Eight Lessons from Vicki Sato (Vir/Vertex)

Life sciences reflections

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Vicki Sato is the Chairwoman of Vir Biotechnology. She has had a legendary career in biotechnology serving as the CSO then President of Vertex Pharmaceuticals, VP of Research early on at Biogen, and a Professor at Harvard.

1.“So teaching that class is great. I should say the reason I am teaching that class was driven by what I did after I watched Biogen get started, which is after I had been at Harvard as a faculty member for about eight years I actually took a sabbatical and got involved in a startup, because it seemed like it would be fun. I met my first venture capitalist and my first patent attorney and all those things, and I discovered that it was an opportunity to do science in a very different environment, in a very different way, and I really liked it. So I left academia and spent the next 25 years in the biotech industry; first running research labs and then at Vertex being responsible more broadly for the company.” Sato took a major career risk at the time in the 1980s to leave her professorship at Harvard to join Biogen. She explored the startup side as a curiosity and learned she liked doing research within a biotechnology company.

2. “We didn't have any positions, because we never had any positions.”

This quote’s context is from a discussion about Sato recruiting a scientist to Vertex. The recruiting target was working at Schering-Plough and was set to lead Vertex’s new virology division. Sato’s stance on positions was that talent is more important than anything. The exact titles and hierarchy can be figured out once the talent is in the door.

3.“As an academic scientist, there are so many disciplines and so many critically important scientific skills you never hear about or think about because you don’t need them to publish scientific papers. When I got to Biogen, I got to interact not only with the first real hands-on physicians who were designing and executing clinical trials, but also with the bioengineers, who were trying to figure out how to take E. coli expressing important transgenes and grow them at the thousand- liter scale in an economically efficient way. It was a completely new world for me.”

4.“Pharma felt it could ignore biotech because we were dealing in big, proteinaceous molecules produced by recombinant- DNA technology. Pharma companies initially tended to believe the first rDNA products, such as human insulin and growth hormones, were clearly drugs but viewed them as variants of the animal-derived versions that had been used historically. Hence, the economic value of the conversion to human forms was likely viewed differently by biotech innovators and traditional pharmaceutical executives.” Biotechnology was initially looked down upon by incumbents because the thought was that the industry was just taking down low-hanging fruit and couldn’t really do the same level of drug development pharma was doing. The biotechnology industry over the 1980s and 1990s began using recombinant technologies to bring new monoclonal antibodies and cytokines to patients and revolutionized drug development.

5.“I was very interested in the company's goal of combining the work of biophysicists, chemists and biologists in the research and development of drugs. The scientists at Vertex have done a remarkable amount of work in a very short period of time.”

6. “With small molecules, the areas of production, formulation, drug metabolism, and pharmacokinetics are hugely important. They determine whether you have a drug or just an inhibitor. That, and working with such a diverse community of scientists, was the source of sustainable excitement and challenge that not only kept me in industry, but really made me love it.”

7. “I credit Josh Boger, the founder of Vertex, with making it the first biotech company that had the audacity to challenge Big Pharma companies in their own technical bailiwick, organic and medicinal chemistry. In the middle of his very successful career at Merck, Josh decided to take pharmaceutical companies on, mano- a-mano, in their historic power alley, and committed Vertex to using medicinal chemistry to make traditional small molecule drugs, but in a new way. It was another example of how the science moves to a place where there’s new capability that allows you to solve problems you didn’t have the power to solve before.”

8.“I really started to feel that we need to get the next generation of scientists excited about biotech and pharmaceutical science. So I thought that the way to do this is – based on my experience, I am a little biased, was that a good place to find really bright, motivated science students was at Harvard college.” Sato spent the latter quarter of her career focused on teaching and helping the next generation learn about science and industry.