AXIS: Mentor and Mentee Q&A

Launched by BioCrossroads in 2025, AXIS mentoring program is helping Indiana life sciences startups kickstart their ideas and bring them closer to reality. Through strategic team-based mentoring with the best and brightest from across the state, startups are getting essential guidance and advice. AXIS has already supported two cohorts that have pitched their ideas and have been paired with mentors.  

Below is a Q&A with Michael Myers and Milos Marinkovich, a mentor and mentee pair respectively.

Michael R. Myers, PhD

Adjunct Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine, Indiana University

What’s your professional experience and where are you at today?  

I have a Ph.D. in organic chemistry and first started working at a mid-size pharma called Rorer as a Medicinal Chemist in ’87. In ’98, I was asked to take three-to five-year year assignment at our R&D facility in Paris. So, we moved the family over. During my 14 years there, we went through four mergers and multiple re-orgs. After three years there, it was time to consider re-patriating. At that point, the company was called Aventis, and the core of the US R&D had been consolidated in Bridgewater, NJ. For a host of reasons, I elected to leave Aventis in ’01 and that is when I joined Eli Lilly as a Research Fellow in Discovery Chemistry. I then moved to a senior management role in Project & Portfolio Management with responsibilities for the portfolio from entry to end of Phase 2. After three years in PM, I moved to lead the team that conducted all scientific and technical due diligence for business development. This role covered all inbound opportunities including acquisitions as well as any out-bound/out-partnering activities. I held this DD role for the last 16-and-a-half years of my career. I can tell you that it was full time entertainment and the best match for my eclectic interests!
  
Why did you join AXIS and how did you hear about it?  

Three of my former Lilly colleagues including a former boss were part of the team that went to MIT for the initial training after BioCrossroads elected to sign on with the MIT Venture Mentoring program. Given that my role at Lilly was focused on external innovation, I was asked to join the initial cohort of mentors in 2019.   

What makes Indiana a great choice for a startup, particularly in life sciences?  

Clearly there is a lot of great science going on in Indiana’s universities along with an exceptionally rich ecosystem of long-established life science powerhouses across Pharma, Diagnostics and Medical Devices as well as a diverse array of world-class CROs and CMOs. I don’t believe that any other state in the union benefits from this unique type of footprint! On top of this there is an incredible array of highly experienced talent available (and lots of failed retirees) to support coaching and advising new startups and entrepreneurs. 

Why did you choose to pair with Goldilox Bio?  

For every mentee I have had the privilege to work with, their passion to deliver their ideas & innovation to patients is infectious. As a result, I really haven’t over-indexed on matching personalities or science background. For me, I often prioritize topics to work on that I believe I can learn the most from. The extra bonus to playing is getting to work with the other mentors on the team which is frankly humbling and equally entertaining. 

What are you doing to support them? Any pieces of advice or lessons that you think are applicable to other startups? 

I think the first and most important thing is that our mentor teams provide a totally “safe” and penalty free forum for the mentees to test their ideas, pitches and business strategies. Having worked at large companies, I think one takes their natural network totally for granted. It is amazing how many times we walk away from a meeting having agreed to make intros to trusted world-class experts or companies (CROs/CMOs) that the Mentee can leverage. Moving innovation forward in the life sciences is an incredibly complicated affair and thus each mentor’s personal networks of trusted colleagues can often be the right weapon to deploy on problems in this highly cross-functional team sport! 

Milos Marinkovich

Founder, Goldilox Bio

Tell us about your startup.

Goldilox Bio is commercializing animal-free cardiotoxicity testing using human cells to improve preclinical safety screening

What has your path to this looked like personally and professionally?

Building a startup is fast-paced and demanding, but my co-founder and I have done our best to move quickly in a space which we believe holds strong upside. AXIS has been an incredibly valuable sounding board with practical mentorship along the way.

What impact do you hope your startup will have?

We aim to replace animal models in preclinical cardiotoxicity screening, reducing drug attrition and post-market risk. Our human cell assays can better reflect patients and enable patient-specific arrhythmia modeling.

Why did you choose to participate in the AXIS program?

I joined AXIS to tap into Indiana’s biopharma expertise and strengthen both our go-to-market strategy and my development as a translational scientist.

What has been the most important thing you’ve learned from Michael?

Michael pushes me to start with what the customer or partner needs and where they’re headed, then build backward from that. His operational perspective has been especially helpful for early-stage decisions in how we can position ourselves as a service provider to biopharma.