Alumni Interview: Denzil Furtado

Next up in our alumni showcase is Denzil Furtado: Co-founder of biotechnology startup Messenger Bio and PhD Researcher at The University of Melbourne. Messenger Bio provides easy and affordable access to mRNA technologies for scientists, the same mRNA technology that went into Pfizer and Moderna vaccines! Denzil's groundbreaking work in an emerging field comes with opportune advice for current PCs and PMs: "if you can suggest genuinely helpful out-of-the-box ideas, you can often provide a lot of value".

1) Tell us about your previous involvement in GCG and what about GCG interested you? 

I joined GCG in July 2016, knowing very little about the world of consulting but wanting to learn through practical experience. I was excited by the prospect of learning more about business while simultaneously helping organizations that were engaged in doing great and important work.

For the next couple of semesters, I worked with other students from UoM on consulting engagements with different non-profits (Western Chances and One Girl), helping clients to gain better visibility into their operations and providing practical recommendations to help them achieve their strategic goals.

2) What has been keeping you busy lately?

I’m currently doing my PhD in Chemical Engineering at UoM, working on mRNA-based gene therapy for the treatment of rare genetic diseases. I also recently co-founded a startup called Messenger Bio, which aims to make it easy and affordable for scientists to access frontier technologies such as mRNA.

3) Tell us more about Messenger Bio. What are the future plans and what about these are you excited about!

Messenger Bio was born out of my early PhD work, where I was exploring the potential of using mRNA to treat monogenic diseases of the brain. When COVID-19 suddenly put mRNA on the map, we realized there were a lot of people who wanted to use the technology for their own research, but didn’t necessarily want to become domain experts. We therefore started the company with the goal of making it easy and affordable for scientists to access mRNA technology, thus enabling them to spend more time focusing on high value downstream projects. By partnering with scientists early on, we hope to accelerate the discovery and development of new products, from vaccines to gene editing medicines. We are currently focused on building our internal capabilities so we can serve more and more customers, and eventually branch out from mRNA into other biotechnology product categories.

4) What advice would you give to current project consultants and managers?

For project consultants, my advice would be to talk to an organization’s customers, donors, etc. if at all possible to build a really firm understanding of where the organization is at, and what is going well and not so well. I would also venture that for many organizations, effective distribution is one of the key challenges (by distribution I mean the ability to reach the right target customer or donor in a cost-effective manner), so if you can suggest genuinely helpful out-of-the-box ideas, you can often provide a lot of value.

For managers, my advice would be to try to assemble as cross-disciplinary a team as possible to allow for different perspectives to shine through. The ability to convince and recruit people from disparate domains is key here, as well as the ability to effectively communicate with people from different technical backgrounds. I would also suggest that it’s really important to set clear ground rules and values for a team upfront to prevent problems from cropping up down the track—things like clear and timely communication, written commitment, showing up on time, etc.