eleven: brain surgery to biotech to nonprofit. Y THO?

[May is Brain Tumor Awareness Month and it’s coming to an end… so we might as well go out with a BANG!]

On July 4, 2016, I registered the domain name “cureglioblastoma.org” on GoDaddy.com.

It was five years into my first biotech startup and I had successfully invented a new glioblastoma drug, OS2966. Unfortunately, we had learned emphatically that major investors and big biotech didn’t want to touch brain cancer. Most cited the small market potential since it was a relatively rare tumor type.

I will never forget when one big pharma “biz dev” (i.e., business development) guy told me flat out during a meeting in our office that although, as a former scientist, he was personally very intrigued by the potential of our novel approach, his marketing department would “crucify” him if he ever brought them our program. Apparently, they “wouldn’t know what to do with it”.

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? Then why are you wasting my time? Go fire all their asses and hire people who would!!!

Even several years before that infuriating afternoon meeting, I began to wrestle with the realization that the profit motive was NOT as great of a driver of innovation in biotech/pharma as I had initially hoped it would be.

Because although it is possible to be aligned with a mission and still make profits, it is way easier as a big pharma company to make tons of money piggybacking on drugs that are already approved and commercially successful (i.e., they pick the low hanging fruit…).

[This is why there are so many versions of popular blockbuster drugs from different companies… they all want a piece of that sure thing at the expense of what could be other, potentially more significant, breakthroughs in the future.)]

It’s myopic.

This was particularly soul-crushing because I had already determined that NIH-funded academic research was largely the same.

[… and part of the reason why I left my residency… will discuss further in the future.]

The main strategy in industry—and especially VC-driven early-stage industry—seems to be, to paraphrase Gary Vaynerchuk, the building of machines for financial arbitrage… basically a focus on optimizing risk management and marketing, using medicine merely as a vehicle. It’s purely transactional. They aren’t trying to innovate. They are using innovation as an excuse to raise tens of millions of dollars to create companies they hope to sell to big pharma for billions (google “stemcentrx”).

It really doesn’t have to be that way. People just need to sack up.

I could have easily done the dance myself and shifted my company towards a more “fundable” direction. The drug I invented held promise for most, if not all, cancers… not just glioblastoma. Certainly, it would have helped with fundraising and likely enrich my personal finances as well as made my life a little bit easier.

[Maybe then I wouldn’t also have been so burned out after 8 years that I had to resign last summer.]

BUT, I didn’t leave behind my career in neurosurgery after 15 years of training to clap like a monkey. I left to kick brain cancer in the ass and I was going to fucking do that. I did what I had to do to assure the drug I invented had the best chance of getting to glioblastoma patients.

And then last summer, after successfully ushering my drug through FDA with my team, I left to do it again… determined to find a better way.

August 11, 2019, the day I resigned from OncoSynergy, I bought the domain name that represented what Cure Glioblastoma was going to be about: “curemotive.org”.

Mark my words… we are going to shake shit up and disrupt the entire field for the benefit of patients (the nonprofit startup way). Come join us.