Insights

Growing up on Cape Cod, Sam Szatek spent her days reading the waves, surfing the outer beaches, and embracing the ever-changing tides. She learned early on that you can’t fight the ocean, you have to move with it.

Biotech companies are facing the same challenge today. Science is moving faster than ever, but manufacturing is still stuck in outdated processes.

Paper-heavy workflows, slow tech adoption, and legacy systems are dragging the industry down. The tide is turning. The companies that adapt and ride the wave of digital transformation will move faster, bring treatments to market sooner, and stay ahead. The ones that don’t? They’ll struggle against the current. That’s where Zaether comes in.

Meet Sam – Navigating the Future of Biotech

In this episode of We Are Zaether, Sam shares how her passion for tackling challenges—on the waves and in the world of biotech—drives her work.

Transcript

My name is Samantha Szatek and I like lobster, bakes up lobster with drawn butter specifically. It was my birthday special treat growing up. So that’s that’s why it’s my favourite and now we’ve introduced it to my daughter.

I grew up on Cape Cod, so I am a beach girl at heart. I grew up surfing on the outer beaches of Cape Cod. We would go to NASA Beach 4 wheel drive out there on a souped up motorhome. And I also enjoy snowboarding.

Well, I’ve been with the Greater Selleck’s organization for 13 years. This past September, I started out in a business development role. We didn’t really even have business development at the time. And that’s where we started really getting insights into what Greater Cambridge was doing right. It was a lot of exciting opportunity there around data and that kind of formed where Zeather came from. Essentially, it was we started to get ancillary services that were really complementary to the Emerson portfolio that the NECI business supports today. But we started to get a better understanding of really what development labs are doing as they move through clinical trials and into manufacturing. And it just started to open the doors for the types of services we now offer today.

With the onset of COVID, it set a new precedent for speed to market with obviously what Lanza and Moderna were able to do when it came to getting the COVID vaccine produced. I was involved in that project from the Lonza side of things, but I think that that precedent that was set drove a need in the organization, a need in the life science industry rather for something different than just focusing on Emerson technology.

And it was really understanding what are we trying to achieve and what technologies are going to choose to help achieve those objectives. And that’s really what forms either. Almost every single one of our customers has really lofty goals on number of products that they’re trying to get to market and how they’re trying to manufacture. And our goal is to get in there and understand what those objectives are and then help them make technology decisions around their digital transformation to achieve those objectives. We’re really focused on getting in customers and staying with them and helping around their operations.

Probably the number of viable molecule targets is greater than ever. But I think it’s also daunting because when you look at manufacturing processes, there’s still a lot of the traditional things that have got us stuck in the past occurring today. If you look at something like tech transfer, it’s so heavily paper, you’ve got science going faster than ever, but manufacturing processes still stuck with traditional problems. And then you add in the mix of new technology advancements, which are also happening faster than ever. How does an organization and a life science customer navigate all of that? Right.

And then on top of that, because of COVID, you need to do everything faster than ever. And so I think that they are faced with a problem of trying to innovate, knowing that they need to digitally transform, but not necessarily knowing where to begin and what problems tackle. And I think that’s really where we come in as ether. I think we’re here to help you navigate that, pick the use cases that are going to get you the best business outcome, whether it’s speed of pipeline acceleration or speed to patient, patient on the other side, and then help you make technology decisions and then implement those technologies to drive those business outcomes.

The new technologies we’re going to see come out, the new things that are going to help drive that speed is just going to continue to increase. And organisations that are really ready to accept that and ready to embrace the change are going to be the ones that are successful. And the ones that are not and live with legacy processes are not going to be successful.