Dr. Anton Dormer

Introduction and a Mentor Who Believed

Taryell Simmons: Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to another episode of Rise Urban Nation. This fella hit me up on LinkedIn using the words inspiring and uplifting, and that hits right to my soul. Ladies and gentlemen, I've got Dr. Anton Dormer in the building. How are you doing today?

Dr. Anton Dormer: I am doing quite well. I'm excited, I'm invigorated, and I just know we are going to have a great time sharing.

Taryell Simmons: I love it. For those who don't know who you are, tell us a little bit about yourself. Who is Anton?

Dr. Anton Dormer: Here's the CliffsNotes version. I graduated at the top of my class from an HBCU, Oakwood University, finished medical school, and have a master's in biotechnology. I've worked in health administration, research and education. I run PepVax, which develops drug delivery and therapeutics for cancer, infectious diseases and, most recently, gene therapy. I also started BioLabShare, which partners with HBCUs to build bio-incubators on their campuses. My purpose in life is to live a life of purpose and use my gifts to uplift, inspire and motivate people to be their best selves.

Taryell Simmons: Two companies! I usually meet people who started one. Which was your first, and what was the most important part of that journey?

Dr. Anton Dormer: My first company was PepVax, Incorporated, and that is a journey of mountains and valleys. It goes back to high school. I was the social nerd. My science teacher, Ms. O'Brien, who recently passed, saw something in me and made me her TA. I prepared all the labs for all her classes, and I found myself invigorated by the lab experience. From that point I said, I'm going to do something in the lab. To be where I am now, owning my own lab and running a research company, it all began with her believing in me when it seemed no one else did.

Taryell Simmons: I love stories like that. My mentor, Max, helped me see something in myself I couldn't see, and that helped me move from DC to California as a young kid. So a big thank you to all the teachers nurturing talent. I always tell people: how you start is not how you finish. What was your humble start?

Lifelong Learners and a Comeback From a D in Chemistry

Dr. Anton Dormer: I have to start with my parents. They are my heroes. They came to this country in the 1950s, my father from Jamaica and my mother from Guadeloupe, both without a high school degree, and they met in the great melting pot of New York City. All through my life they were in school. While I was in elementary school, they finished college. While I was in high school, they finished master's degrees. While I did my undergraduate and medical degrees, they did their doctorates. They would drag me along to their classes, and since they were both in healthcare, I wanted to do something in healthcare. Seeing them hustle made me someone who takes hold of the opportunities that are here.

Taryell Simmons: They were lifelong learners, and you clearly took that from them. Tell us about your industry. What does it mean to be a scientist in biotech?

Dr. Anton Dormer: Biotechnology came about in the 1980s, almost by accident. Universities were doing research but not commercializing it, until a venture capitalist saw a business model. Biotechnology uses biological specimens to produce therapeutics. Instead of creating a chemical, you might use E. coli and recombinant DNA to produce a protein you can shape into a treatment. One of the first targets was diabetes: people injected insulin that came from pigs, and recombinant insulin, Humulin, became a standard of treatment. It's the merger of technology and biology.

Taryell Simmons: And you've taken it a step further with BioLabShare. How did you come up with it?

Dr. Anton Dormer: I have to go back again. In tenth grade I was hanging out with the wrong person and basically didn't go to school, and I graduated with less than a 3.0. Right before graduation, my chemistry teacher, who favored the popular kids, gave me a D in a class I needed for medical school. My mother actually cried at my graduation, because she saw how socially isolated I felt. But I got mad and made three goals: graduate in the top one percent of my class, in four years, with no C's. And guess what? I graduated summa cum laude with no C's, in four years, and I did it in chemistry, the same subject that teacher gave me a poor grade in.

BioLabShare, HBCUs and Building Trust

Dr. Anton Dormer: My inspiration now is that I don't want anyone to go through what I went through. BioLabShare partners with HBCUs to bring something that has not been on their campuses. There are 107 HBCUs, and many, especially those not state affiliated, are struggling. BioLabShare is two-pronged. First, America has a shortage of wet lab bioresearch space. Second, I am a raisin in the sun: when I go to conferences, it's just me. So we create bio-innovation space and diversify at the same time. I've been talking with Alabama A&M, my alma mater Oakwood, Morris Brown in Atlanta, Bowie State, and St. Augustine's in North Carolina. Big universities like Stanford and Johns Hopkins earn licensing funds from their technology. I want to birth geniuses.

Dr. Anton Dormer: In medical school I worked 18 hours a day on my own summer research protocol. Imagine a 22-year-old thinking he can cure diabetes. I want to mentor students from places like Oakwood and Morris Brown and bring those institutions revenue. We don't have to keep asking for a handout. We can be the ones creating opportunities.

Dr. Anton Dormer: There's another reason. The Tuskegee syphilis study still hangs over us like a cloud and keeps many of us from getting vaccinated for COVID, even though we are disproportionately affected. If our medicine is made by people who look like us, I believe we will trust it. BioLabShare will hopefully decrease that distrust, because it will be for us, by us, and we can see who made it.

Taryell Simmons: I love that journey. As someone who used to talk to high schoolers, how do you feel about engaging students sooner, at the high school or even elementary level?

Dr. Anton Dormer: I agree one hundred and ten percent. We intend to engage diverse communities at the high school and elementary levels, because if a child doesn't feel confident in science by fourth grade, they're mostly done. I would even say we have to start before birth.

Taryell Simmons: Before birth? Give it to me, Doc.

Dr. Anton Dormer: My oldest son is finishing law school, and my other son is doing well in engineering. With my youngest, I started nighttime read time the first night we brought him home, with little cue cards. By third grade my wife introduced him to Scratch, and by fifth grade he was teaching it to his classmates. He's been a tech entrepreneur since twelve, and one month he made close to thirty-five thousand dollars and said he was going to retire. That early interaction is something we can do ourselves without waiting for the school system. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Michael Dell all started early. We have to start our children early so they're ready when they come for an internship.

Advice for a Late Start and the Power of Persistence

Taryell Simmons: Ladies and gentlemen, we've got to start early. But you got a later start and made up for lost time. What steps would you give someone who never engaged with science in high school but wants a science career now?

Dr. Anton Dormer: First, you need a roadmap: where do I want to go and how do I get there? Find a mentor who has been there and done that. Then take baby steps. Do a one-year certificate and see if you do well, then move to a two-year or four-year program, or, if you already have a degree, a master's in that area. I did a master's in biotechnology to move into research in immunology and bioinformatics. Research, research, research. We may love something that isn't the path for us, so make sure your skills match your love.

Taryell Simmons: What's one good lesson life has taught you?

Dr. Anton Dormer: Persistence, persistence, persistence. Success is not defined by how many times you've fallen, but by how you get up every time, with head held high. There's a song by Donnie McClurkin that says a saint is just a sinner who fell down and got up. Don't let anyone move you off your goal. Be dogmatic about it and flexible in how you get there. A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. Look at your setbacks as a setup for your comeback. Stack your stumbling blocks into stepping stones so you can reach a higher height. Always fall forward, never backward. It's better to shoot for the stars and reach the moon than to stay on the ground.

From Craigslist to $30 Million and Back to Zero

Taryell Simmons: That was liquid gold. If you missed it, hit rewind. In science you want to get to the failure faster so you can find the solution. Was starting a company similar?

Dr. Anton Dormer: That's a deep question, and I've had some major failures. I started PepVax because I was recruited to a university to bring research there, but only the president seemed to get the memo. It was a lot of frustration. So I said, I'm going to start my own company and do my own research with no one telling me I can't submit a grant. I didn't know anything about starting a company, so I put an ad on Craigslist. Too many people responded, and the core team I found ten years ago is still with me today. I would not suggest anyone do that now. There are better ways to recruit.

Taryell Simmons: I think you lucked out. Today's Craigslist might not get you that same company.

Dr. Anton Dormer: We were flying when we started. We did a reverse merger with three hundred thousand dollars and went public, and for a time we were the only diversely run publicly traded biotechnology company in America. On the first day the company's value went from three hundred thousand to fifteen million. We were focusing on triple-negative breast cancer, which disproportionately affects African American women, and we were about to file for a ten-million-dollar raise. Then one Friday my CEO called: our stock had been suspended because someone was manipulating it. My paper wealth was close to thirty million dollars, and I went from thirty million to zero in a nanosecond. I didn't tell my wife this, but I cried. Then we had to figure out how to keep the company alive and get our product back from the entity we had licensed it to.

Dr. Anton Dormer: You have to be resilient. Sometimes you lay down and bleed a while, then heal, get back up and keep going. Almost five years later, our team is still here and thriving. That also inspired BioLabShare, to nurture entrepreneurs of color so they avoid the same mistakes. One regret is that we didn't set milestones. A mentor would have said: once the stock reaches a certain price, take some out for a rainy day.

Why Biotech Lacks Diversity and What the Future Holds

Taryell Simmons: Going back to your raisin in the sun point, biotech feels like a very white industry. Why hasn't the industry sought to diversify?

Dr. Anton Dormer: Ninety-five percent of biotech venture capital goes to white males, four percent to women, and less than one percent to people of color. If you only see a sea of yourself, you'll only find a sea of yourself. The barrier to entry is also high: it takes almost a billion dollars to take a product from the bench to market. But we also have to venture into these fields. We need pioneers who will knock on the door. Parents have to gear children toward STEM, because so many young children of color say they hate math and science. Who told you that? So there are two stumbling blocks: the systemic challenges, and the internal challenge of not preparing ourselves to even reach that glass ceiling and knock on it.

Taryell Simmons: Thank you for being a pioneer. I like to give people their flowers while they're here. What does the future hold for your industry and for people of color?

Dr. Anton Dormer: This industry is here to stay. I imagine that within fifty years average life expectancy in the Western world will be close to a hundred, up from around forty in the 1900s. But lifestyle negates a lot of that. Heart disease is the number one cause of death in the United States. Why do you need bypass surgery if you exercised and ate a balanced diet? Western medicine needs a strong preventive component. Unfortunately, I don't see a major push to truly diversify biotechnology, which is why BioLabShare is so necessary. If you have something that can save a life, a lot of people don't care who you are, but we have to position ourselves in that space.

Taryell Simmons: Could we combine Western advances with Eastern preventive care? And is the goal to have BioLabShare in every major hub?

Dr. Anton Dormer: Combining preventive medicine with high-tech biotech would be spectacular. And yes, if we can spread BioLabShare to all 107 HBCUs and beyond, we'll get a diversity of thinking. Like the story of the elephant, each person sees one part. We want everyone to step back and put the ideas together. There's space for everybody.

What's Next and Where to Find Dr. Dormer

Taryell Simmons: We could talk all day. Tell people what projects you're working on and where they can find you.

Dr. Anton Dormer: BioLabShare, of course. To all the HBCU presidents: contact me, we're ready to build. We expect to build the first one on the campus of Alabama A&M starting next year, a five-to-seven-million-dollar project, and we plan one or two labs per year. With PepVax, we license our drug delivery platform to academia and industry for cancers, infectious diseases and gene therapy. You can find me on LinkedIn, where BioLabShare and PepVax also have pages. I also have a YouTube channel where I try to rap. Search Anton Dormer on YouTube and Facebook. I'm the only Anton Dormer I know of in America.

Taryell Simmons: I could tell you had some rap in you. Any last words of wisdom?

Dr. Anton Dormer: I like to end with this: go on, go on, go on, and go on. Don't stop dreaming. Don't stop believing. You are your own limitation; no one can stop you but you. If you get knocked down, get back up. The race is not for the swift or the strong, but for those who can endure. Believe it, breathe it. When you look back, you'll know you have traveled that thousand miles and reached your goal. So just keep on going on.

Taryell Simmons: You heard it best: keep on going on. Thank you for that inspiration. We'll have the links in the show notes. And my HBCUs, you know who you are: reach out to this man so we can make some things happen. That is our show for today. We'll see you on the other side.