Welcome to the Woman of the Week podcast, a weekly discussion that illuminates the unique stories of women leaders who are catalyzing change throughout the life sciences industry. You can check out all our podcast episodes here.
Sharon Rogers was drawn to AmyriAD for a simple reason: unfinished business.
Rogers first encountered the company’s lead candidate for Alzheimer’s disease, AD101, around 2007 when she worked at a biotech startup called Sonexa Therapeutics.
“We built the company around moving this molecule along,” she explained. “So we finished up the nonclinical work and the toxicology, went from the first dose in humans and all the way into phase 2, answering questions about what this drug actually does in Alzheimer’s patients.”
But Sonexa ultimately became a victim of the 2008-2009 financial crisis, Rogers said, and the molecule was returned to the Japanese company it had been licensed from.
Now as CEO of AmyriAD, Rogers has AD101 back in her hands and is finally advancing it deeper into the clinic.
“I was extremely excited to be able to get hold of it again (and) enable phase 3 clinical trials because this drug is phase 3 ready,” she said.
A long-time entrepreneur and pharma business pro, Rogers made a name for herself in the Alzheimer’s space after leading the global development of Aricept, which has been on the market to treat confusion and cognition in Alzheimer’s patients for decades.
AmyriAD is testing AD101 in combination with Aricept, which targets acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter involved in memory and attention. But while Aricept “preserves acetylcholine by inhibiting an enzyme that normally breaks it down,” AD101 increases acetylcholine release, making the two more powerful together, the company said.
AmyriaAD is hoping to begin a phase 3 study this year, and it’s a full circle Rogers is excited to complete.
“One of the things about Alzheimer’s is once you are in it, it’s very difficult to leave because the patients are compelling, the science is compelling, and because after more than 30 years, (there’s still this) totally underserved medical need,” she said.
Here, Rogers discusses the latest on AD101, the recent biotech downturn and what she’s learned from her long and winding road through pharma.
Welcome to WoW, the Woman of the Week podcast by PharmaVOICE powered by Industry Dive.
In this episode, Taren Grom, editor-in-chief emeritus at PharmaVoice, meets with Sharon L. Rogers, PhD, CEO, AmyriAD.
Taren: Sharon, welcome to the WoW Podcast Program.
Sharon: Thank you, Taren. I really appreciate being invited.
Taren: It’s our pleasure. Sharon, you have been at the forefront of moving the needle around Alzheimer’s disease for years including development strategies around Aricept, one of the most successful treatments in the field. Why Alzheimer’s then and now? And then we’ll talk about what’s working and what’s not, if you don’t mind.
Sharon: Well, that sounds great. So there’s always the why then and why now; and the why then, some people could call it serendipity, but it was sort of a directed serendipity. Had I thought about Alzheimer’s disease for my career path, and the answer to that was no. I was thinking about drug development because pharmacology, drug development, how you apply principles of cell communication to disease and find ways to improve things for patients, that to me was the fascinating part of it, this big molecular communication that goes on in our bodies every day. But the company I was contemplating working for had this drug called E2020 in their pipeline. And I always, for any company, I would consider; I look to see what’s in their pipeline, what are they doing, who are they, how do they see themselves as a company. And I saw this drug, and there were other drugs like this that were currently in clinical development, but they were failing miserably.
But hypothetically speaking, looking at how the drug’s putative mechanism of action was stated, they should work. And as a sort of a clinical scientist, I’m thinking to myself, “Yes, but this should work. There’s no reason for this not to work.” And as a young person who’s very impetuous, I said, “Someone must be doing something wrong.” So approaching it from that path was sort of how I got steered into the Aricept program and to neurodegenerative disease and Alzheimer’s. One of the things I will say about Alzheimer’s is once you are in it, it’s very difficult to want to leave because the patients are compelling, the science is compelling, the fact that this remains after more than 30 years, totally underserviced medical need. Those things are all compelling and those are all major drivers as to why now.
Taren: I love that. And you’re right, it’s such a fascinating area of study and there’s so much still unknown yet there’s progress being made. Are you encouraged at this point by what you’re seeing?
Sharon: In part, yes, I am encouraged. I’m encouraged in part because even though there have been a lot of clinical failures in the anti-amyloid area and also in the anti-tau area as well, they’re only failures from a commercialization standpoint. They are huge successes from the educational standpoint because it has helped us learn that amyloid plaques don’t cause Alzheimer’s disease. Amyloid plaques occur as a general part of aging for all people; and in some cases, they get involved with other things going on within the brain that end up causing the signs and symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. So what that interlinkage is, is now what people are focusing on. So, yes, can you attenuate some things by reducing amyloid early, early on and not when the disease is established. We’re learning “Yes, you can. Okay, that’s another little block of education that we can put into the way we approach this disease.” Inflammation – how does that work and how does amyloid stimulate it. We learn a little bit more and we add that to our understanding of the disease.
So we keep making these small incremental steps. Most people, especially on the pharma side where commercialization is the major focus, would like to have a single treatment, a single cause, a single cure. But by and large in the pharma business, I have to be pretty honest that we don’t cure much; in the pharma business, we manage disease. The greatest and closest things we have to cures are generally in the cancer area where we can use various types of chemotherapy or we can resect surgically. But when it comes to actually curing diseases, we can’t cure hypertension, we can’t cure diabetes, we can’t cure a lot of things; but through treatment, we learn how to manage them. And you notice that it’s not usually with one drug. It’s usually with compendium of drugs that are used to find what’s the best key to managing each individual patient.
And so people are finally becoming reconciled that Alzheimer’s disease is like many other diseases from that perspective, you have to look at the whole patient and find the best way to address them. So while there’s still significant effort put toward disease modifying agents, I think we’re starting to get more people paying attention to disease management agents. And I really hope that people focus a little bit more on that because we will always need disease management.
Taren: That was such a great perspective. I love that, that from a commercial perspective, maybe not successful, but some of those things that medically maybe didn’t work the way everybody thought they might have provided you with clues to what’s next. And I think that’s such an optimistic and a unique perspective on such a difficult disease. So thank you so much for sharing that, I really appreciate it. You’ve had a really prolific career and we’re going to get into that a bit later, but what drew you to your current role in this company?
Sharon: In this company, it was unfinished business. There’s no other way to say it; it was unfinished business. This company was built around a portfolio of drugs. The latest in development is this drug that we refer to as AD101; and AD101 I actually had at another biotech startup that I was involved with back in the late 2000s. And that company was a victim of the 2008-2009 financial crash. But at that time, this particular drug had been identified from a Japanese pharmaceutical company; and to this day, I’m still very well known in Japan because Eisai is very well known now in the world. And when I started working for Eisai, they weren’t. They had no international presence, they were about the number five company in Japan; and Aricept helped vault them into the international arena.
So Japanese companies know who … is and they understand Aricept. So when I was circulating through some small Japanese companies looking at some discovery molecules that they had, this drug that we refer to as AD101 was one of them. But it had these really unique characteristics that made it interesting to study because at this time, and this was back in around 2007-2008. This is right before the crisis and I was really focusing on that time combination therapy. Even though everyone else was looking at disease modification, I was still thinking about combination therapy and patient management.
So at any rate, the Japanese pharma company agreed to license it to my last biotech startup which was called Sonexa Therapeutics. Had a great team of people there. We built the company around moving this molecule along. So we finished up the nonclinical work and the toxicology, went from the first dose in humans and all the way into phase 2, answering questions about what does this drug actually do in Alzheimer’s patients. And we got an answer to that, that was a positive answer for the drug as a combination therapy with Aricept. The drug isn’t so useful by itself, but the mechanism of action is such that one wouldn’t expect it to be. But when you add it in with donepezil, you get a doubling of functional capability amongst those patients, and it’s just an amazing thing to watch and be part of.
When that company became a victim of the financial crash and became insolvent, they returned this molecule back to the Japanese company that had discovered it; around 2014 was the turnover date. And then some investors, some of whom I know very well and have known probably for 30 years, told the Japanese company if they could find me and get me to work on it again would they release it and let it come back out. Then … was that company, they said yes. They did track me down when I was trying to just enjoy life in general. It’s one of those things that once you have something that works, you know patients will benefit from it and you get another shot on goal. I know of very few developers who would turn that down.
Taren: I would think that. How exciting.
Sharon: Yes. So I was extremely excited to be able to get hold of it again, to start the work to enable phase 3 clinical trials because this drug is phase 3 ready.
Taren: That is really exciting. So tell me, phase 3 this year or next year?
Sharon: Much of that will depend upon the current biotech financial markets which are in extraordinarily bad condition. It’s pretty brutal out there. So as soon as we have the funding where we’re sure that we’re going to be able to deliver for patients, that’s when we will start, not until because it’s false hope to try to publicize a study that you’re going to do when you’re not ready to do it. I know these families and patients fairly well over the years and they’ve had many disappointments. So I like to engage with them when I’m sure that I can take the patient and the family where they want to go on a clinical trial.
Taren: That’s very admirable. You came out of stealth mode at the end of 2021 and you had that great data around AD101. You just talked about the brutal financial environment in the biotech space. So what are you doing to attract investors and grants, and you have a compelling story to tell?
Sharon: Well, we talk to people. I probably talk to investors day after day after day. And when the biotech market is having a downturn, it’s not so much the quality of the pitch that you’re making to an investor, it’s also the degree of liquidity of the investor. If you were a biotech investor and you had the downturn that you had where stocks were down anywhere from 50 to 70%, well that means as an investor your liquidity is also down 50-70%. So while people may like the idea and want to invest, they have to look very selectively. And most investments come from large funds that have a portfolio of companies. So their first priority is going to be the companies that they’re already funding. So they’re busy trying to keep them whole, keep them functioning, and then whatever is left over goes for new investment.
So we’re making progress and attracting interest, and that’s the only way that you can do this is keep talking to people and you have other people who keep talking to people for you. And once you get a few key investors to come in, others will follow. But until you get to that point, you just sort of keep at it very diligently.
Taren: Fantastic. Well thank you for that and thank you for being so transparent about the challenges that are involved in this sector right now. According to your official bio, you have been working in the life sciences for 35 years and obviously you are still famous in Japan, but can you give us a snapshot of some of your career highlights in addition to Aricept?
Sharon: Sure. I started in the pharma industry. Basically, I did my dissertation defense on a Friday. I already had a job at a company that was called Wyeth which then became Wyeth-Ayerst. It was a part of American Home Products. I remember just sending letters to pharmaceutical companies telling them why they should hire me when I was a student, and I got a few people who were willing to interview me and landed a job that way. So I did my dissertation defense on a Friday. I loaded my dog and what was left of my belongings into my very old Honda and drove across the country to Philadelphia. And on that Monday morning, I was still waiting for my furniture to be delivered to my rental house but I was in a hotel, my dog was there, and all of a sudden I was in an office of my own with a secretary and people giving me credit cards.
And so that weekend was peculiar I guess is the best way to describe it. On Friday, I’d been in a lab coat with rat blood splashed across the front of it, and my hair was literally tied back in a paper towel. And on Monday, I’m in a business suit and a pair of pumps and sitting in an office with people trying to do things for me and entering an executive experience. So it was a real shocker, but you learn from those big changes. You learn how to figure it out. You learn how to find out how to move within the company and how the industry moves. I was really, really lucky with Wyeth because they did not like to spend a lot of money on employees and people were usually stretched. And I was able to get exposure to licensing pitches to all segments, all therapeutic areas, because I was their clinical pharmacology team at that time. Every first dose in man and pharmacokinetic study came through my group. If I could do mechanism of action studies, if I could convince them to do that, they would generally let me do those things.
So I had extraordinary access and I can only say it was really lucky, and thank you to those people at Wyeth, all of whom I remember with great clarity because they let me figure it out. And did I make mistakes? Well, yeah. But overall were the mistakes horrible? No, they weren’t and they were all learning experiences. So I went from Wyeth to Roche, the house that Valium built. And when I went there, it was at their second restructuring after Valium’s patent was over. And for those of us who were students and students in clinical pharmacology, and there weren’t many who were like that, my old department chair was one of the original, not inventors of, but users of levodopa in Parkinson’s disease.
And so I went to Ohio State University College of Medicine to get my training because they actually had a 24-bed unit where as a graduate student I could do clinical studies if I designed them and got permission to do them. I had access to being able to do a lot of amazing things because this was all funded by the pharma industry. So I had a feeling for how the industry moved. And my department chair ended up leaving academia and going to be a VP for clinical at Roche. He didn’t really like the industry and ended up going back to academia. But for all of us at that time, Roche was like the epitome of the company you want to emulate because they had their institute of molecular biology. They had a vast pipeline, high quality folks working there. Usually to get into Roche, you had to have one or two postdocs to get in; and so I had industry experience and they took a chance on me. The reason they did so is because they were developing brand new state-of-the-art clinical pharmacology unit. So since I had come from knowing how to work in a unit within the hospital, I was a clinical pharmacologist by background and training, I was selected to come in and help develop that component of it.
And Roche is a fabulous company and an interesting company because they didn’t care if my work ever commercialized a product. What they cared about was did my work end up on a podium for a presentation, did it have scientific merit, what kinds of things could I do that would keep the Roche name and put them as a leader of developmental science in pharmacology in the medical headlines. And so that’s what I did. I did things from measuring the response of healthy volunteers to a trivalent influenza vaccine. Flu vaccinations are always very much a point of argument, and some people take them and some people don’t. And so as part of the health projects within Roche, everyone was entitled to get vaccinated if they wanted to.
So working with the company and the other employees and that large employee database, I started taking samples from before the vaccination and then at various points after and measuring, “Okay, what kind of antibodies did these people produce and how quickly. Were they really making antibodies to new streams or were these antibodies that were sort of refreshers to old streams they’d already seen?” and we published that data. Certain ACE inhibitors have what’s called a first dose hypotensive effect; and so we sort of characterize that and tried to look at were there any predictors for assessing whether someone was going to have this effect, which can be quite alarming when someone stands up and they lose consciousness because they’ve had this first dose hypotension effect. And so they let me do that.
One of the biggest studies that was interesting that they let me do was they let me figure out a way to measure the onset of action of injected benzodiazepines. And this was a very cool study because at that time they had developed midazolam, and midazolam is still widely used for what’s called conscious sedation like going in for a colonoscopy or an endoscopy. Valium had also been used, but the difference between the two is Valium has a very long half-life so it takes a long time to clear from the body and patients are sedated longer. Midazolam, on the other hand, is a very fast-acting agent. And so the patient clears it from the body easier, you can send them home without too much worry that they’re going to be overly sedated at least for more than a few hours; and so it was a big seller for Roche. But the key was as they were having some crises especially in endoscopy suites because patients were receiving too high a dose. And the reason they were receiving too high a dose is because the onset of action is very different between Valium and Midazolam. And this was in the labeling and it was very clear, but a lot of times people don’t read the labeling.
And so what I did was I cooked up a way in which to measure in healthy volunteers the actual onset of action, and show people how it impacted on functional capability between those two drugs so that people could see visually and get an understanding of what those two drugs looked like. And it was some very clever use of common tools that we use every day but published that work and presented it at a pharmacology meeting in Germany. And so there were things like that, that helped bolster their labeling and helped bolster the way people understood these two agents and how to use them safely in the clinic. Just think of that.
Taren: That’s fascinating. These were not external clinical trials; you were basically using Roche employees, if I’m understanding that correctly, to conduct some of these studies?
Sharon: No, the flu vaccination were Roche employees. Everything else, those were healthy volunteers that we recruited externally to come into our inpatient unit and they all signed informed consent; and of course, healthy volunteer studies, they get paid.
Taren: Right. But I just wanted to make sure I understood that. But the first one with the flu vaccine, that is amazing that they let you do that.
Sharon: The employees were getting the vaccination anyway voluntarily and it was only those employees who wanted to have the vaccination; and all of them also gave their informed consent to let me take blood samples from them.
Taren: Sure. But they were very innovative.
Sharon: It was the best way to have access to a broad swath of people. I remember publishing the work; and so for companies that made vaccines, they were less enamored with the work than other people. But basically it does show that because you cannot keep up with the variants, and this goes for COVID or anything else, you simply can’t keep up and anticipate in advance what the variants will be. So when you do give a vaccination, the main antibody that’s being produced from that vaccination is going to be what we call memory antibody. So it’s going to be more what IgG is the subclass and not the early stages of antibody when a new protein fraction is recognized. So it will be the sort of the memory antibody, but that in and of itself it’s still good because it’s still going to recognize certain epitopes on the virus and it’s still going to give you some benefit. It’s just if you have a very new virus with a very new and distinctive epitope, it’s not going to be so effective at this very new variant. That just contributes to the knowledge that we already had about it but in a way that was presentable in a scientific format.
Taren: Thank you for sharing that and giving me some more clarity around that. In addition to your work at Roche and at American Home Products, I had to giggle because I don’t know there are many people who remember that company back in the day. You took me back.
Sharon: Chef Boyardee spaghetti and cleaning products – you name it.
Taren: Exactly. And I know exactly where that location was. You took me down memory lane there for a second. You are also a noted serial entrepreneur. What gets you excited about the startups?
Sharon: What gets me excited about the startups? Well, I’d say my first startup was when I was a graduate student and so it was my second year in graduate school. I come from a background with figure skating involved, although I was no star or major competitor. My involvement was more fun with my friends and serious but not serious. But my boyfriend at the time was a former triple gold medalist, and his coaches and he at one time were all training people in Buffalo, New York. When I was in graduate school, he was trying to figure out what he wanted to do. And so one night he, me, and the son of his former coaches were all I think having beers and pizza, which is what most graduate students do after a volleyball game. And so we started laughing and talking about how we could start a restaurant, and none of us knew anything about starting a restaurant and none of us really had much money. But we started formulating this idea about starting a restaurant and starting it on the campus of Ohio State University because you’ve got this huge throng of customers that are right there as long as you make it convenient enough for them.
So we put together our idea and we scrabbled together as much money as we could, and then we looked for a location, and there was one location that we could actually get very cheap but I was nervous about it because it was just around the corner from the main street called High Street. And High Street, all these bars and restaurants are right there front and center. This was just slightly around the corner in the same building, same corner building but around the corner. And I remember talking about how many businesses had gone under just because they were around the corner so we had these long debates about how do you get people to go around the corner. So we decided signage and whatever we could do, and talked to the people about that building. And the people who owned the building were the Hare Krishnas, if you remember that sect. So we rented space from the Hare Krishnas. They liked our pitch and they gave us this really good deal for a really cheap rent.
So we rented space from them and we had about $5,000 and elbow grease. All of us are very competitive people that we brought that competitor mindset to it. I was scrubbing out fryers while I was studying for my qualifying exams. We ended up opening the first restaurant about a week after I passed my qualifying exams. And we went from that one location to having a second location further down on the south part of High Street, and then a location in Cincinnati, and then another location in Cincinnati, and one in Steamboat Springs; and we just kept going and going. And then in later years, after my boyfriend became my husband and then later our careers went in different ways, the restaurant kept going. And for people who are familiar with American restaurants, it’s now a worldwide franchise that’s publicly traded called Buffalo Wild Wings.
Taren: Get out of here. That’s amazing.
Sharon: And so if you have the Wild sauce, it’s probably completely reformulated now but the Wild sauce was my design with jalapeno peppers and a wearing blender; you can do a lot of things. And a lot of these things we would be doing at night while we were laughing and joking and having a good time. So it was a very dedicated effort. The biggest successes of the company were well beyond after I had left that circle and certainly going public was well after that as well.
But, yeah, that was my first entrepreneurial endeavor. And you really do get hooked on it because when you work from the beginning, you sort of forge a very tight teamwork alliance where everyone is working hard, everyone is doing jobs that are not necessarily in their job description, but everyone pulls together to do what needs to be done and I love that environment.
Taren: You went from around the corner to a global phenomenon. That’s amazing. It’s quite the story. It’s fascinating.
Sharon: It’s hard to believe. And there were lots of other people that came along during that, that propelled the company to a global phenomenon. I had nothing to do with that. I had to do with the start, the name, the concept. I think by the time that I left, we had maybe 10 restaurants by the time my ex and I split apart, he’s a fabulous person, and it went on from there. But it’s just very different because I went from that very entrepreneurial environment into a large cap pharma company and American Home Products, a large cap company.
And so that was a very different atmosphere and you learn about how much can you move or not move when you’re part of a big machine. And the big machine has money and backing and it has just this force by its mass to be able to move products along, but the wheels turn slowly and it’s very difficult to change course when you’re in a large cap company like that. And I really did prefer the smaller, more agile way of moving. So within my own small department at Wyeth, I could be more agile. When you spread that out across the company, things were still going to go at the pace of the company.
So when I went off to Roche, again it was more of an entrepreneurial endeavor. They had this brand new discreet pharmacology unit. And so it was moving along through that and then trying to apply the science that we got out of that into products that were in development within the company. And quite frankly, I missed line management. I missed moving and commercializing things, which I didn’t get a chance to do in the unit. So when an opportunity came about to join a startup, and it was a startup with deep pockets because it was Eisai with their first company in the US. So I wasn’t going to have to go around to venture capitalists and raise money, there were deep pockets already there, but it was going to be small. And so I joined Eisai as a startup and I was the sixth person hired. Again, you’re going back to the same theme about more of an entrepreneurial way of doing things.
I really find that smaller companies are more agile. They are better for getting discovery products going and moving them into the clinic. When you get to phase 3 development, that’s when you’re starting to look for a larger machine, more like a large cap company to help the process move because you then have to be planning for the commercialization of the product, training a field force, deciding what types of studies you’re going to need for marketing types of activities. You have to have a whole infrastructure for a commercial scale of making the product so you do a lot more.
There’s a place for small startups, and this is usually in the early stages when you don’t want to follow a template or some type of a cookie cutter way of developing but you want to look at that molecule, its characteristics, and how to best parlay that into the knowledge that you need to decide “Do I move this to phase 3? Is this anything or is it not anything?” And to answer that question efficiently and in a cost effective way is something larger companies have difficulty doing in my opinion. You get people who are reluctant to give up on the product, but to me it’s a scientific question “Is this anything? Yes or no.” Make a decision and then decide the best way to deploy the company’s resources. And you have more creativity in a small environment to design a more clever study that collects a little bit more information that answers questions other people might not have thought to answer, and then move the process forward.
So when I went to Eisai, that product with program with Aricept came in at around 60% of the budget of a usual approved product in a large cap company. It came through faster because we were a small agile team, and we could move it faster. We could be pushy and fussy about the things we felt had to be done a certain way. And yet by the same time when we were ready to bring in all the infrastructure that you need to commercialize, that’s when the co-promotion agreement with Pfizer happened. And so we were able to really unroll a massive commercialization program that let it hit the market running and become this number one drug in the world. So there’s a place for entrepreneurialism and there’s a place for the fabulous role of large cap pharma. They’re somewhat divergent, but when you know how to merge them at just the right time the outcome is good.
Taren: That’s an amazing story in and of itself. So really early employee at Eisai before it did have a significant footprint and then leading the launch of that, as you said, which was a ground-breaking drug at the time with a global entity. What a lot of learnings … class.
Sharon: It was. Well you learn too what is important to both sides and the interaction, and you try to find a way to give the large promotion partner everything that they need to be successful; but at the same time always remembering that if you go too far in one direction or another, you risk maybe botching something in your program that you don’t want to botch at the last minute, so it’s a balancing act. And I actually love thinking about those questions.
So when that finished up, I ended up going to Japan with Eisai and spending three-plus years in Japan working there and starting their strategic portfolio management group because they had not had one. And in portfolio management, you’re assessing all these things about how to move something from discovery into the early clinic, how to make those hard decisions about when to continue to develop or when to cut, and what are those decisions made on. And when you’re bringing things into the clinic, how are they going to fit with your existing field force; how are they going to fit with your existing manufacturing capabilities; how are they going to fit with your business structure in general and making decisions from a more educated perspective and selecting candidates and pushing them through. You can’t make those selections perfectly, you can’t. It’s impossible. Things somehow and sometimes don’t pan out. And if we’re a large cap company when you have a launch that you need to have and all of a sudden you don’t have it and your shareholders are depending on it, that’s when a large cap company will go out and license something in like they did with Aricept. So you can sort of find a way to get everybody happy through partnerships and alliances.
Taren: And that perfect balance. Yeah, that’s great.
Sharon: When you’re lucky, the balance is perfect.
Taren: Well, I think there’s a little bit more than luck involved there. I think there’s a lot of skill too. Let me go back to some of the beginnings with you. Science, has that always been a love of yours? What drew you to science initially? Did you love it as a kid?
Sharon: I was fascinated. I was fascinated by it from the time I was a child. My parents started calling me Doc Rogers when I was about 3 because I would be so interested in how things worked and what happened. I remember there was a toy called, I don’t know if you really call it a toy, but there was a model called the ‘Visible Man’ and then the ‘Visible Woman.’ You could take these models apart and see where all the organs were and all the skeletons were and put them back together. It was a matter of learning new little factoids and things that I could repeat like how far a sneeze travels and what’s involved in some process or another.
My family always had book for us to be able to look at. So I tried learning to read from my older sister’s books that she would bring home from school so I could go to the collection my family had and start looking at them. And one of them was one of those old fashioned health books and just about every family had one. They’d have all kinds of bizarre pictures in them, but a lot of descriptions of medical conditions. And I remember looking through that just being absolutely fascinated and trying to understand as only a 3 or 4 year old can try to understand what was going on. Learning words that I didn’t know exactly how to say them, but the picture of the word would stay in my mind.
Taren: I love that. And I love the fact that this has been a calling of yours since a child and that has been through your entire life. So in high school and then in college and grad school, this is obviously a career path you have chosen. What have been some of the biggest joys about being part of this medical community for you?
Sharon: The exploration, the learning. The learning and the understanding. And every time there is a new discovery where we thought we knew something, thought we did, and we find out we didn’t really that it might look more like this instead. It’s always exciting because I think people would like for what we talk about in medicine to be foolproof and to be the absolute word, but frankly it’s always a work in progress. And if you look at it that way, every new discovery, every new change of opinion, every new way to manage patients becomes exciting.
Taren: Absolutely. And that goes back to the first part of our conversation when we were talking about this new company is unfinished business for you. So let’s talk about some of your leadership strengths. How would you describe yourself as a leader?
Sharon: I would describe myself as an inspirational leader, at least that’s what I endeavor for as an inspirational leader, where the objective is to get people not to just do the best for the company or for their paycheck or whatever, but to do the best for the team that they’re working within and to do the best for themselves, to be their own best selves in their workplace. And in order to get that kind of performance from people, you have to sometimes be willing to give them a lot of slack to see where they take it. And when you find that they can’t get to the success level that you would like or they can’t necessarily figure out how to go with that freedom to operate, you try to modify and teach them other ways to approach the question, to approach the work product. You always have to watch very carefully to make sure the work is in fact being done. But I’m a big believer in letting people sort of chart their own course. And I think too that I select people for our teams and the companies that I’m involved with where I think they want that opportunity.
There are a lot of people who are really good, they’re great talkers and they’re very accomplished, but they just don’t have that hunger. I have to see that in someone because especially at a small biotech startup, many times you’re asking people to work extraordinarily hard, a lot of hours because you’re a tiny team, and to buy into the project. And so I think I look for the personality that’s going to fit well with the team, that’s going to mesh well with it so that we can be well oiled and working together toward a common goal. And when people are successful, we all share in that success. I think I probably mentioned earlier it’s like one of those massive floats at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. There’s lots of room on the float to pull people up to celebrate too, lots of room; but if you have nothing to celebrate, it’s a lonely place. So the idea is to just find ways to celebrate and to celebrate their achievements and to celebrate the accomplishments that we make. It’s never about one person, it’s about team performance.
Taren: I love that analogy. Yes, because there is lots of room to pull up people as you go along. And they may have different skills and talents and you need everybody on the float to make it work. I always like to ask leaders what is one of the biggest leadership lessons you’ve learned whether it was something that worked really great for you, or maybe it was a leadership lesson that came from a hardship. Can you point to one?
Sharon: Well there are a few because you never are totally successful and part of trying to turn oneself into a good leader is understanding that you’re not going to bat a thousand. It’s very much like baseball on performance metrics. But I’d say the disappointments are when I haven’t made the best judgment about where someone can go. I haven’t recognized limitations or other factors in their performance, and I’m unable to extract one way or another in the way that I would like to optimal performance. And in that case, you do have to make some hard decisions. And I’d say whenever I have to do that, whenever I’m not able to help someone perform the way the team needs to, it’s hard. It’s extremely hard, it just is. And when I haven’t myself performed where I think I should, that’s a hard one too. I always look at it very clear-eyed. There’s no other way to do it but to examine performance very objectively, think about what could have been done better, put the lesson in my memory to not forget about it and then try again.
Taren: I love that. Yeah, you have to learn along the way. It always seems that those people decisions are the hardest lessons for successful leaders. So thank you for sharing that and being so transparent with that answer. Is there anybody who’s had a particular influence on your career?
Sharon: Absolutely. While there are a number of people, there are people who have had impressions in a useful way, but where I look at that and I say, “I do not ever want to behave like that person.” I do not ever want to treat people like that person. And so one always remembers those, or you remember people who you expected were going to be one way but ended up disappointing. And sometimes it’s just humanity; no one is perfect and so no one can live up to a standard that you may in your own mind have set for them. But the one that sticks out was the person who ultimately I looked at the leadership style and I thought that works, that fits my personality, that fits the way that I would like to be as a human being. I can’t reveal the individual’s name or anything like that, but this was in a large cap company that had just gone through some patent losses and so there was a lot of rebuilding within the company going on and a lot of tension within the company because profits were down, our earnings calls were not fun for people. It was just a difficult time.
I watched this individual take one of the harder areas in medicine at that time. She had a team of people around that people wouldn’t always consider those folks are going to be stars but figured out how to turn them into stars. I just remember every time success within the product line was announced or every time an achievement was there, she was always throwing roses basically at the people in the team that made it happen. And a colleague of hers who was somewhat jealous of that said, those people will go to their deaths for her. And I thought, well, they probably wouldn’t go that far, but they would put down their very best performance because they knew what was going to be recognized. And to this day I remember that model of leadership and I hope to do it justice.
Taren: Yes, throw as many roses as you can along the way because it’s the sweet smell of success, right? A little trite but it is.
Sharon: Now that’s a good analogy. And it feels good on a personal level too.
Taren: Absolutely. Wanting people to be recognized for the good work they’re doing. As you said, everybody’s working very hard, this is a difficult business to be in. Nobody gets there alone so to have that team recognition is so important. Are you a mentor right now? Do you have some folks that you’re taking under your wing by any chance?
Sharon: Within the company, I look at every day as being a mentor one way or another. I try to make certain that my team members know when they’re performing well and when they’re going above and beyond. I also try to ensure that team members can watch me stumble so that they can see that it’s not just all easy and that everyone makes mistakes. So I do that every day. And in my outside life and my outside endeavors, there are also people that I mentor. I’m just starting a new initiative with something on the outside that I can’t talk about in a business perspective and it’s all about mentoring. It’s all about moving people along and sort of legacy planning. So bringing up new young talent to come in and mentoring them so that even if they’re not where they need to be now, that we help them become better. We find a way to help them be better at what they’re going to be doing because not everyone does jobs the way they should when they first start. If we did, life would be also boring; so everyone needs that.
Taren: I love that “life would be so boring.” Obviously, from an outside perspective, you are viewed as a role model. Do you consider yourself to be a role model?
Sharon: There might be a few people who would say, “Oh sure I do.” I’m a bit more equivocal on that. I think that whenever you start to drink your own Kool-Aid, you’re in a bad place. And I look at every day is a new day, every opportunity is a new opportunity. I’d say the bigger question I want to answer at the end of each project or at the end of each day or at the end of whatever is going on was, was I true to myself in the way that adversity was handled, in the way that failure was handled, and in the way that success was handled. That’s sort of how I look at it. I’m probably a little harder on myself than I am on anyone else.
Taren: Well, aren’t we all sometimes, yes. The reason I ask that question is that still to this day, even though there’s been quite a bit of progress made, there’s still a few women sitting in that C-suite at big pharma, midsize pharma, biotech companies. The numbers are growing, but in comparison it’s still not the rosiest of pictures. So you have blazed a trail for others to follow, hence the reason I asked you if you considered yourself to be a role model because you have modeled behavior, you have modeled performance, and you have paved the way for others to follow. So thank you for that.
Sharon: Yeah. Well Taren, every day I look at it as sort of a surprise. Most of the women who do achieve this pinnacle generally come from marketing sales promotion, that side of the company, because that’s where the money is. When you’re on the development side, you’re creating the things that are going to bring that money in, but it’s more of a money sink where money goes out. So you don’t see as many leaders picked from that side of the business within pharma. So from that perspective, it’s a little bit unusual. But perhaps it’s unusual because I have deep empathy for the sales marketing and promotion side, understanding what they need to have in order to be able to sell a product and trying to figure out what’s a way to give them the tools that they need to sell it. I don’t disrespect it, I respect it tremendously. So I look at the whole pharma business as being quite integrated from that perspective.
Taren: Absolutely. Around the corner again, back to your Buffalo Wild Wings days; you knew what would work. You told me the Buffalo Wild Wings story already, but what’s the one other thing that most people don’t know about you?
Sharon: Well I do keep my personal life and professional life very separate. I think that’s generally a good thing. So one of the things that they may not know about me is probably my absolute passion for the arts. Art is my oxygen so I attend a lot of functions that have to do with art, particularly visual arts. I process visually. So when I’m looking at a development program or some kind of sticky issue in the company or a fundraising issue, it doesn’t matter what it is, you can visualize it. And there are a lot of people who are visual processors and so many times I will just sit back and think and let the pictures just form in my mind, and art sometimes helps me do that. So I tend to gravitate toward artists who have a more visceral abstract view of the universe where everything is always moving and swirling, and you’re trying to make sense out of the movement and you’re making sense out of the flow. And there is this uniformity to our cosmos that sort of permeates everything that I look at it. So I’d say processing style; maybe people don’t know the details of my processing style, but it’s very much integrated in that whole visual universal movement.
Taren: Well, this has been a fantastic conversation, Sharon. I can’t thank you enough for your authenticity, your transparency, and providing so many great insights. But we are at the WoW moment. So I’m going to ask you if you can identify one moment that has either changed the trajectory of your career or has left a lasting impression on you. Can you narrow it down to one?
Sharon: That is a really hard one. Well, there are definitely two – one was when I made the decision to give up putting a roof over my head and having a job to go to graduate school. That was a major change because it’s quite disturbing to think about, “Okay, how are you going to live? What are you going to do? How are you going to support yourself?” because I was so compelled to continue with this education, but that’s earlier on. I’d say later on, the decision to go to Eisai was probably a big change because I was in the middle of a large cap pharma company. Everything’s well-funded you don’t have to worry about a thing, the wheels of the company help keep everything moving, and so it’s easy to focus on one part of the picture. And going to Eisai – one it was learning how to work with Japanese which I was unfamiliar with, and learning how to really struggle in a startup environment where you have very few resources.
And then as part of that work with Eisai was when I ended up after Aricept’s approval, going to Japan to live as an expat. When I’ve been going there four or five times a year and I thought, “Oh, sure, I can do this and it will be so nice to learn a little bit more about how the company works”, but it was life changing because I decided to move into a neighborhood with no other expats. So my neighbors were all Japanese, going to the grocery store, going to the dry cleaner, they still had video stores then so going to the video stores, finding a restaurant – everything was not Westerner friendly. And as you learn more about what are the social norms, how do people interact with each other, what’s just a typical day like, that is life changing. I would highly recommend to anyone who hasn’t had an expat experience to at least travel for a prolonged period of time, at least a year. But I was living there for over three years in that environment and really trying to learn and to understand. And I came home, one, knowing for sure that I didn’t understand anything that I thought I understood before and that’s humbling; and, two, appreciating so many subtleties about that culture.
The things that I miss now, when you go down and you sit down in a restaurant and they bring you a warm oshibori to clean your hands and the way that people share their food. Most of the restaurants, they don’t understand the Western way where everybody orders their own sort of dish and everyone sort of starts eating at once and it took me a long time to sort of understand that everybody shares everything. So you order things one at a time and everybody’s sharing the food, everybody’s sharing the beverage, it’s long, it’s slow. Nobody starts looking at you to see if they can turn your table quickly and get another group to sit down. And when you leave, they don’t bring a tab and put it on the table. They see that you’re getting up and they help with your coat and your umbrella and you pay your tab out the door; and it’s just a perfectly wonderful way to cap off an evening. So I would say being an expat in Japan, which I got to through Eisai was probably the biggest thing. I will never be the same person because of that.
Taren: It sounds incredibly civilized that way of life. Well thank you so much for sharing that very personal story with us. This has been a terrific conversation and I can’t thank you enough again for the great insights and the leadership tips and being so authentic, and for doing such great work on behalf of a population that desperately needs a cure. So thank you.
Sharon: Thank you, Taren, because you just gave me a platform to talk about work that I love. And Alzheimer’s disease is something that I now committed a significant portion of my life to. And so anything that helps get the message out there about how much we are working for patients and trying to find things that will make every day of their life a little bit better is important. So thank you for that.
Taren: It is our pleasure. Thank you.
Thanks for listening to this episode of WoW, the Woman of the Week podcast. For more WoW episodes, visit pharmaVOICE.com.
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