[Music]
hello and welcome to the amplifying
scientific innovation video podcast i'm
your host dr sophia annoyed onya founder
and ceo of the sofia consultant firm a
we bank certified life science marketing
and communications consultancy that was
established in new york city with the
goal of amplifying scientific innovation
the goal of this broadcast is to
showcase the importance of science
advocacy health equity and influential
leadership through conversations with
senior videos who will share their
unique perspectives on their leadership
journey
corporate vision and industry outlook
my guest today is dr ron cohen
president ceo and founder of akoda
therapeutics a role that he has held for
over 26 years since he founded the
company in 1995.
alcotto therapeutics is a public
biotechnology company developing
therapies for the status of the nervous
system including parkinson's disease and
migraines
i connected around two years ago when i
covered the collaborating for noble
solutions more commonly known as the cns
summit live in boca raton florida
following an invitation from the
conference's chief curator and chairman
dr ahmed khalali
excitingly ron and i have over 280
mutual connections on linkedin and i'm
absolutely thrilled to welcome to the
show dr cohen
thank you so much sophia it's uh
wonderful to be here it's my absolute
pleasure so i always start the podcast
the same way which is to ask you what is
your definition of scientific innovation
well that's such a big question um
you know every i think everyone is going
to see it through their own particular
lens and
as a physician and not a bench scientist
i take a fairly broad view of that and
and
confining it just to health care because
if you start talking about science of
all kinds we'll we'll we'll uh we'll be
here at this time next year discussing
it but if we just talk about healthcare
innovation you know to me it really is
anything
that ultimately
improves our ability
or the ability of health care
professionals to improve the lives of
patients full stop and if that means a a
novel scientific platform for example
stem cells or mrna
uh
that one can then
use to launch a whole new generation of
therapies that are more effective more
broadly applicable than others had been
before then that's obviously scientific
innovation i think in addition
uh finding new ways of
of
developing drugs effectively is
scientific innovation whether it's
decentralized clinical trials and using
digital means and electronic health
records and all of the tools that are
increasingly at our disposal to
accelerate the time to market for
therapies that can improve lives or uh
just to get them to market at all when
otherwise they might not have been for
lack of the right data the right trial
design the right execution so even that
is scientific innovation it's really
anything that has not been thought of or
reduced to practice before
that effectively advances our
understanding of disease of illness of
biology and enables us
to
manipulate that or to apply that
understanding in a way that improves the
lives of our fellow human beings
wow i absolutely love that definition
and it's very patient centered and it
showcases who you really are which is a
physician at heart and also ties into my
next question which is what inspired
your interest in medicine and your
subsequent switch to biotech
entrepreneurship
well the interest in medicine there's a
pretty straight line from my dad who was
a neurologist
actually a neuropsychiatrist he
practiced both
and he was on staff at the neurological
institute at columbia i think for over
40 years and then even then he continued
to practice after he reached mandatory
retirement from the medical center at 75
he went to grand rounds every week he
asked questions he stayed up in the
literature and he continued to practice
at his home office until he was 87 years
old
so and because he had a home office and
because he not infrequently would take
me up to the medical center on weekends
when he did rounds on his patients i
suspect it was part of his uh grand
master plan to induce me to go into
medicine and apparently it worked
[Laughter]
that's wonderful and and
why did you decide dan to switch to the
biotech field like what inspired that
well i i actually i did want to mention
that my mother was a magnificent concert
violinist and the reason i didn't become
a concert violinist is that i was very
far from magnificent at the violin
so
[Music]
getting it to biotech was
serendipity i i actually had a uh
another passion in life and it wasn't
the violin but it was in the arts and it
was in theater and primarily musical
theater so i grew up singing and being
in shows all my life since i was in
first grade through college through
medical school even and then even during
my residency i found time during my
senior residency year to do a show in
charlottesville virginia i was at uva
so
for me it was a close call between
theater and medicine and in college i
didn't declare pre-med until junior year
which is very very late i had to make up
the courses during the summers and then
right at the end i i sort of flip it was
medical school acting school medical
school acting
and it was when i realized that there's
a truism in medicine that says that
the the person with the lowest gpa in
your medical school class is still
called doctor
whereas whereas actors who can be the
finest actors in the world can be
waiting tables for 25 years and so that
that guy i essentially took the easy way
out and went to medical school
um so when i when i got to my residency
at university of virginia in internal
medicine i loved it i loved everything
about it i loved medicine it was a
privilege it was always a privilege to
be able to minister to the sick and
with all due humility and understanding
that
what we knew had to do and what we know
how to do as physicians is a fraction of
what people need us to know and that
that goes back to our innovation
question and the desperate need
constantly to be innovating and
advancing uh medical progress
so uh i was
going to do a neurology red as a
residency like my dad
and i i was about to apply and i did
this show
my senior year as a resident because i
had a three-month block of primary care
where i had no night call they were
auditioning one of the musicals i always
wanted to do i auditioned i got the lead
it was the town theater and we did the
show and then we got a really good
review and when i read the review i
thought you know what if i can get a
review in charlottesville i can get a
review in new york i'm going back to new
york to be an actor
or at least a tribe
and that's what i did i i thought i was
putting my neurology residency uh on
pause it turns out i never got back to
it because i went back to new york and i
was living a dual life for a few years
where i was practicing medicine i was
doing emergency medicine i was doing
walk-in clinics emergency urge what we
call urgent care centers now back then
it was a new thing and the reason i did
that was that again i had no night call
so i could do the theater and juggle my
schedule and in fact i could work two or
three days a week or even do two 24-hour
shifts in an emergency room pay the rent
and then audition take class and so on
and that's what i did and i did tv
commercials i did off off broadway i did
student films at nyu film school so
that's about as far as i ever got
but i had a wonderful experience and
while i was doing it
a couple of friends from my medical
school class at columbia called me one
day and said hey we have a couple of
friends they're married they are phds
they were at nyu in the same lab and
they just left because they have tissue
engineering technology and they formed a
little biotech company which was this is
in 1986 the very beginning of biotech
and they said and they want they asked
us to help find them a doctor who could
do the clinical things because they're
phds
and i said well why are you calling me i
have no business background i have no
idea about business call my brother he
went to wharton
[Laughter]
and they said well we thought of you
because they specifically wanted a
physician
who also had presentational skills and
experience and you did theater so we
called that's why we called you
so you know what they i had no intention
of joining a company i knew nothing
about it but they were my friends they
wanted me to meet them and i thought
fine you know i'm up for anything
i met these two scientists in new york
city i they had a little office that
they had rented on east 33rd street east
34th
east 33rd
and
i walked in spent half a day and they
took me through the science and i got
hooked they were growing bone marrow
in a dish that looked like
three-dimensional human bone marrow and
they were going to use it for
transplants and they were going to be
using it for other organs like skin and
liver and i thought wow this is amazing
and they asked me to join them
on the spot and there's a whole story
that goes with it i don't think we have
time for it although it's really funny
but
essentially the uh the woman of the two
her name was gail naughton
pulled out an employment agreement from
a drawer and pushed it across a desk at
me and said
sign here
and i was flabbergasted and i looked at
this employment agreement and it had my
name typed in it already and i just met
her that morning
and i said well how is my name here i've
been with you all morning she said i
typed it last night
wow
wow
and so it was very strange and it turned
out that the the friends who had
introduced us had sent her a couple of
videotapes of me on tv
and based on that she already decided
she was going to work with me and she
was very
entrepreneurial very forceful
and
for reasons to this day that i'll never
fully understand she said sign here and
she pointed at the line
and i signed and i joined this little
company i gave up uh the
i thought i was giving up medical
practice the acting i went to work for
this little company of course the joke
was i was the fourth or fifth employee
one two three four fifth
employee and uh the the funder was a
family friend of theirs who was a
dentist in albany new york and he was
putting in a few hundred thousand
dollars to keep it going so after a
couple of months he came to me said ron
i'm sorry we have to let you go
and i said why herb and he i said am i
doing a bad job and he said no no you're
doing a great job although honestly how
you would know anyone was doing a great
job at that point is beyond me because
we were winging it the entire way
and uh he said i can't afford your
salary
and
instinctively the first thing that came
out of my mouth was oh that's fine i'll
work for free
because i was having a ball i was it was
something
it was so challenging it was so
interesting the whole idea of taking
science out of the lab and
putting it into patients was so
alluring to me
that i just said i'll work for free and
in fact for another couple of years i
went back to working emergency rooms on
the weekends so i could pay my rent i
didn't have i wasn't getting a salary
and i was working for this company until
we could get funded uh and by the way i
i decided to audition a couple of times
and did one off off broadway show while
i was doing that
um
but uh
it was exhilarating and then we found a
real ceo from eli lilly a guy named art
ben venuto who came in
uh he became my first mentor in business
he he was he'd come up through
commercial he was really strong and he
moved us to san diego kicking and
screaming because i'm a native new
yorker and you just don't do that
and i spent six years in san diego we
took the company public and ultimately i
was running national trials for a skin
replacement a human dermal replacement
that we were growing for burn victims
and that that was my history of getting
into biotech
wow such a beautiful story i don't know
which one to focus on but serendipity is
probably the most important ingredient
for innovation and i i love absolutely
your your journey i think it's one about
creativity about freedom and about
taking risks but also enjoying what you
do right it's not always about the price
tag it's also about the experience for
you so thank you for sharing that
thank you and that and you i you you hit
on
my core
learning through all this and when
people ask and younger folks who are
trying to get into industry and or
thinking about it
that's what i always tell them is
you know it's age-old wisdom and if you
read a lot you'll see it it comes up all
the time and it's because it's true
um
there are other things that come up all
the time that aren't true
especially these days but this is true
which is
do what you're passionate about do what
turns you on
if you do that
you will be happy you'll be fulfilled no
matter what happens
and and you may very well wind up having
all kinds of material success or other
success but if you get up every day and
you just are turned on by what you're
doing
that's what you want to do and the i
think a mistake i've observed people
make is that they stick with something
knowing they hate it knowing they don't
like it knowing it's not for them but
intellectually they're thinking well
i'll put in my time i'll pay my dues
i'll do this
and i won't do this other thing that i
have an opportunity to do right now
because it's too risky even though i
would love it i think that's a mistake
by and large
right now you know it's it's a it's
amazing that you mentioned that because
i was going to ask you what advice you
would have for young people that are
looking to get into the biotech industry
and to become
authentic leaders like you but not just
what you've said i think you know
through the research that we've done and
i think you and i also connected on
twitter your twitter handle at ron
cohen's hair is is truly iconic and it
showcases your authentic leadership so
how are you so bold like where where
does that come from because
you you're truly
inspirational just again just listening
to you and from what i know about you
but how do you become so bold
so
um it started out as an april fool's
joke actually
so let me be fully transparent come
clean with the audience here
uh it was less bold than
serendipity so there was a and and sarah
you'll hear me use that word a lot
because
again
opportunity knocks
you need to know when it's knocking you
need to recognize it because it knocks
not infrequently
and you need to catch it when it knocks
and go for it
so in this case there was a a brilliant
uh number one biotech analyst he was uh
iii number one every year a guy named
mark schoenbaum who tragically died
much too young a few years ago
but when he was
in his
full glory he was a brilliant analyst of
the biotech industry of companies and by
the way he was a physician and a
musician as well i believe he was a
violinist so he uh he got my mom's
talent i didn't very unfair
so
he and i had a warm relationship
and
one day out and he had an impulse sense
of humor as well and one day
out of the clear blue sky
he wrote a note about our company acorda
my company
and uh he put my headshot at the top of
it which is almost unheard of it's
extremely unusual in an analyst note and
there was a big red arrow pointing at my
hair
and he opened up by saying
my team and i have done a great deal of
research and we can now authoritatively
say
that we have discovered the ceo in the
industry who has the best hair it's dr
ron cohen and he put
well
you know my my email lit up my text lit
up everyone's writing come on really and
it just became because he was so well
published you know everyone followed him
so everyone knew about him my investors
were calling
so it was this was in
march i think of that year
and uh
my head of communications came up to me
and said hey ron we came up with this
idea i wish i could claim the idea but
it was his idea and he said uh i had
this idea
we should spoof
uh mark with a new twitter handle for
you at ron cohen's hair and i burst out
laffy i said brilliant let's do it let's
do it right now so we put out a tweet on
at ron cohen's hair and we actually took
my head shot
removed the face so it was just an
outline and what was left was the hair
and that you'll see it if you go on at
wrong codes hair you'll see that's my uh
that that is my photo
um
and you talk about lighting up i had
reporters calling and tweeting i was on
actually i was working out that morning
it was early in the morning and all of a
sudden i see my twitter feed go off and
it's a reporter who's well known saying
is this seriously you
so um
and then you know it it it
got a lot of attention and i realized
you know
it's real it's fun it's a bit of an
homage to mark who i respect and like
very much so why don't we keep it and so
we kept it from there and it obviously
it's a bit distinctive
uh and then you know um when he passed
away
uh i i actually thought maybe i ought to
just go back to something normal like dr
ron cohen or whatever
and then i thought you know what this is
a little piece of history in biotech
it's amusing it's fun it's human and
it's me
so
let's keep it because
one of the other things i've learned is
that um
i forget who said this there's a
wonderful quote which is don't take life
too seriously you'll never get out of it
alive
and and i thought you know if you can
amuse people a little bit they see it
brings a little smile
great and then we can talk about serious
things while we're at it
now you're exactly right and thank you i
am laughing so hard i'm actually crying
and that's not that doesn't usually
happen so i appreciate
the humor that you bring and now i'm
going to tap into
your scientific brilliance so can you
provide a top-line overview of ongoing
work at accordance
well um you know i'll wind the clock
back a little bit very quickly and say
after six and a half years at my first
company advanced tissue sciences
i was so enthralled by everything i'd
learned and you know i learned by doing
and making 12 mistakes a day if not more
and then you just learn i didn't i
didn't get an mba but i i got my
practical mba and at one point or
another i did pretty much every job in
the company whether it was going under
the hood business development
communications oh and clinical
regulatory quality and so forth so
i was enthralled by all that and i
decided to go back to neurology
in my way because i always loved
neurology and as i said you know where i
got it from
and it was such a desperate area of
medicine this is back in 1993 at the end
of 93 when i started working on it we
incorporated in 95 it took a year and a
half to set up but i decided to take
everything i'd learned and pour it into
a new company that would work on
restoring function to people with spinal
cord injury and then ultimately ms
parkinson's and other neurological
diseases so
we we've had quite a journey over the
last 25 years uh you know we started out
with
nothing
and
it took five years to get venture
financing so i financed it i boot i
bootstrapped
ultimately raised about eight million
dollars in the first five years through
various means from individual investors
and then a business deal and so on but
it took us
15 years from that point to get our
first drug developed and approved and
that was a drug called ampera still on
the market and it restores some walking
ability it improves walking ability i
shouldn't say restore but it improves
walking ability for people with multiple
sclerosis so a vital function it's been
incredibly well received we turned it
ultimately into a 600 million a year
drug
um
and then uh we've put
a total of nine drugs into the clinic
in various conditions including as i
mentioned parkinson's ms epilepsy
uh one for heart failure which was a
little bit off off the beaten track for
neurology
two of them have so far come out the
other side a few of them just failed
outright for various reasons whether it
was safety or efficacy or both
that's the nature of the industry for
every
10 drugs that actually makes it into
human trials it takes about 5 000
molecules just one of which gets to a
human and then one in 10 on average make
it out to be a develop approved drug so
we're two for nine now so we're doing a
little bit better than the odds
three years ago we lost our patents on
ampera prematurely nine years
prematurely because a judge in delaware
decided to overturn our patents and
that's a whole other subject about the
capriciousness uh and frankly unfairness
of the whole patent system and the way
it's adjudicated i should mention the
same patents were upheld in europe which
gives you a sense of
wow the arbitrariness of the system
um
so we lost the patents we lost most of
our revenue from the drug so we've had
to restructure a number of times since
then
but fortunately we got a parkinson's
drug which is an inhaled form of
levodopa
that came out of bob langer's lab at mit
it is a vital drug for people with
parkinson's whose medicines wear off
before their next dose and then they go
back with their symptoms
for an hour sometimes hour and a half or
more and there's nothing they can do
so it's a desperate way to live when
they have a lot of these going on or
even a few can be very disruptive and
this is an inhaled form that begins to
get them out of it within 10 minutes
so
uh we launched that at the uh uh march
of night of 2019
and of course we were out for a year we
had all kinds of reimbursement issues
other issues just to get our footing we
started getting our footing things
looked like they were really coming back
and then covet hit
so we're still struggling with that but
the drug is out there we get lots of
grateful patients talking about it and
actually
even ampera has held up against generic
competition better than
uh you would have expected better than
most people expected
and it's because
we have always taken very seriously that
everyone in this company is practicing
medicine and i tell that to everyone
whether i don't care what your title is
you can be on the administrative staff
you can be a lawyer you could be um
in finance but i tell everyone consider
that you're practicing medicine with all
of the privilege but also responsibility
that that entails
and that means you always think about
what is the best for the patient it
doesn't mean you always get to the ideal
because given our system and its
complexities
you can't
but you do your best to try and to
inform your decisions keeping that in
mind along with the other
many many sometimes conflicting
responsibilities that you have as a
public company
wow i mean extremely well said i think
even going on your website i remember i
saw
that you adhered by the policies of
value in terms of diversity and
inclusion but even bigger than that so
obviously your company's headquartered
here in new york state which of course
is a growing biotech cluster but what
can
we as a new york life science community
do to ensure greater representation of
women and minorities in senior
leadership positions as well as company
boards
wow i don't know an easy answer to that
you know on some level actually at a
major level it needs to be done locally
with every company every leadership team
and ceo every board of directors
needs to get religion if you will
about this it's a lot better than it
used to be when i served as chair of the
board at bio which is the biotech
innovation organization
i created the
diversity and inclusion committee of bio
and that is going strong we've had a
number of initiatives
really to help do exactly what you're
saying which is to spread the
gospel of diversity
and um prompt action on the part of
companies in our industry really to take
it seriously because again if if you
just think about it a little you realize
we're all practicing medicine at the
highest possible level of innovation of
providing the newest the best the
greatest new therapies in a continual
way and a progressive way to patients
those patients
are diverse it's the whole population
it's everyone
and
the talent pool
that we draw from has to be equally
diverse because talent is everywhere and
frankly
you know you have all these different
communities of people out there who
identify in different ways they may all
identify as americans which is wonderful
they may all identify as human beings
but then they also identify in you know
as women as people of color as uh
people of different gender preferences
different sexual preferences whatever it
is
if we are serious about
reaching those people including
a diverse and representative population
in our clinical trials
uh
commercializing our drugs so that they
all can benefit from them
don't we need to be informed about what
is specifically important to those
communities not just what is generally
important to everybody and the only way
you really get at that is to have those
representatives in your company who are
passionate about your company's mission
and passionate about bringing it to
those communities from which they arose
yep i i couldn't agree with you more
again extremely well said and i like the
continuity between your work at bio and
what you instill in your own company and
what you also amplify to the external
world right so you have to think
globally right but add locally it starts
with whatever company policy
people will that i don't think you know
it's hard to mandate you can mandate
some of it california has their rule
about you know a certain number of uh
women percent of women on the board i
actually don't think that's such a bad
idea because there are times
at the beginning of a movement that
ultimately is taken to be routine but is
very far from routine in the beginning
sometimes you need a kick start
sometimes you need to force people to
experience it
and the trick is
you know how do you do it in such a way
where you don't build so much resentment
that it's counterproductive so it's it's
a bit of a balancing act at the end of
the day i think we in the industry and
particularly the leadership of the
industry have a lot of responsibility
here to go out and
and get
our fellow companies to our fellow
leaders to
understand this and to and to uh
practice these these things
yeah i i agree with you uh dr michelle
mcmurray
who is of course the ceo of bio she was
a guest on the podcast um last year and
she actually emphasized that diversity
of thought as being integral to
innovation
um
yeah so as we wrap up i just have two
questions i'll call it a question and a
half so uh are there any emerging
technologies or that you're excited
about and why
maybe
no
i've got i've got recency bias and
selection bias because there is so much
that is exploding
uh whether it's by specific antibodies
particularly in cancer
obviously
mrna which is now you know uh with the
covid pandemic has come to the fore but
even in mrna there's progress now with
circular mrna and that's going to you
know presumably last longer and be more
effective you've got rna interference
such as the drugs that all nylon is
producing which already are showing
tremendous advantages let's just take a
big a big
disease area that they're that they've
addressed which is their pcsk9 drug
inclusion
to lower cholesterol one shot every six
months you don't have to remember to
take pills and so on it's it's
mind-boggling stem cell therapies car t
cell therapies we're learning just just
this last week there was a remarkable
report from
a vertex sponsored n of one trial in a
man with diabetes type one diabetes who
appears to have been cured by injecting
insulin creating cells that were created
in a lab out of pluripotent stem cells
app if that holds up and i even if even
if this one doesn't hold up it's almost
there it's coming
crispr
for gene therapy and all of the children
of crispr that are coming
i i could go on and on but you know i i
started out in the industry
when
there wasn't even the results of the
human genome in fact there was no human
genome project in in 1986 this was
beyond it wasn't until the early 90s
that monoclonal antibodies took off and
when they did there were two
spectacular failures in the industry in
clinical trials that took down all the
companies that were trying to do
monoclonal antibodies and people gave up
on them right well
what's pretty much the most commonly
used or developed therapy right now it's
monoclonal antibodies of one kind or
another so that's the nature of progress
and what we're seeing now
after the human genome project in 2000
2001 when we first sequenced the human
genome at a cost of whatever it was uh
billions of dollars and years and years
of effort now you can sequence an entire
genome in
what an hour a couple of hours it's
going to be down to 10 minutes before
you know it so
so the pace of
innovation in this in our industry has
been logarithmic it's been logarithmic
that wasn't always the case but it is
now and
just
i can guarantee that in five years if we
have this conversation
i'll be giving you a whole new laundry
list of uh of uh my favorite therapies
yeah but that's the beauty of innovation
as you stated earlier is dynamic and
that's why ultimately we ought to
measure it in terms of the impact to our
patients and at some point in the
spectrum of our lives right our patients
are caregivers so we
should continue to pay attention to
scientific innovation
so
[Laughter]
so my final question for you is very
simple do you have any other commentary
or thoughts that you'd like to share
with our audience
well i have a lot but we don't have time
um you know i i would leave it by saying
that uh
that when i got out of medical school
and my residency i never dreamed that
this was going to be my career i it
didn't even exist when i was in medical
school
so
i i guess but
i i would go back to something i said
earlier which is
if i had to distill everything i've ever
done
into one lesson just one
it would be
wait for opportunities learn to
recognize when they are there you'll
know it if you listen to it it's not
here actually or if it is here it's here
which is in your right brain but what we
more
normally call down here our gut
right there's a gut call that in life
frequently we're called to make whether
it's on a mate
whether it's on a career whether it's
what house to buy or where to live some
of the bigger decisions whether to have
kids how to raise them some of the
bigger decisions
are not left brain calls they are gut
calls they are right brain calls and
very often those of us who have been
trained in science trained in medicine
we tend to favor the left brain very
often which is the analytic side very
important critical innovation critical
to everything so is this side the
creative imaginative part the gut part
the emotional part is equally if not
more
critical to innovation but also to how
you live your life whether you are
passionate about what you're doing when
you get up in the morning has very
little to do
with the formula that you're working out
in your head
it has all to do with
just this gut feeling that oh my
goodness i can hardly wait to get back
to doing this
wow
look for that
wow well thank you i think um
you know growing up in nigeria i had a
god and my god was for amplifying
scented innovation now i didn't know
what it was called but i followed that
and and i'm so glad that i did because
it allowed me to make people like you
and not only inspirational and creative
and brilliant and all that but you have
such an excellent sense of humor and is
humbled in this gratitude for life and
and and for people and i i feel like i
could talk to you from now until next
year um which will be impossible but i
thank you so much for the generosity of
your time and for the wise words that
you've shared here with us today well
thank you sophia and if in closing of
one more point i want to make to the
audience i do want to point out
because some of you are looking going
did he buy that and is it important art
and it's critically important art and i
want you to know that i think one of my
daughters when she was six or seven
painted this specifically for me
and
she asked me if i would hang it up in my
office
and i told her i couldn't think you know
over here you've got sort of the company
related things and some of the awards
and things but right behind my desk you
have this because i couldn't think of
anything more important that you would
want to put up in your office
wow wow well thank you for sharing that
i think the beauty of the pandemic in
some ways it allows us to share parts of
ourselves that were previously hidden so
thank you for sharing that important
story with us and for everything now the
only thing i wish you could have done a
better job of is the violin uh skills
but i'm sure you could pick that up much
later on
i'm so sorry you brought that up sophia
but thank you so much for the
opportunity
oh thank you and i appreciate your time
have a good one okay
[Music]