Tony Coles – on a mission to tackle Alzheimer’s
托尼•科尔斯：挑战阿尔茨海默病
广州医药翻译公司：科尔斯将自己执掌的癌症药物开发企业出售后，出任初创企业Yumanity的CEO，向阿尔茨海默病发起挑战。
After brokering the $10bn sale of the biotech company he led, Tony Coles planned to follow the well-trodden path of corporate high flyers who have shifted down a gear or two. “I wanted to take some time and think things through,” he says. “Spend time doing health policy consulting, or sitting on boards.”
在将自己领导的生物科技公司以约100亿美元的价格出售以后，托尼•科尔斯(Tony Coles)为自己规划了一条很多成功企业家在降低工作强度以后常常会选择的老路。他说：“我想花些时间将事情想清楚。将时间用于提供健康政策咨询或者在企业的董事会中担任职务。”广州医药翻译公司。
The sale in 2013 of cancer specialist Onyx to Amgen, one of the biggest names in biotechnology, had netted Mr Coles a personal windfall estimated at $60m. Time was a commodity he could well afford.
专门开发癌症药物的Onyx Pharmaceuticals（简称Onyx）于2013年被出售给了安进(Amgen)，后者是生物科技领域最知名的企业之一，据估计这笔交易给科尔斯带来的个人净收益高达6000万美元。科尔斯完全花得起这个时间。
When a former colleague, molecular biologist Susan Lindquist, contacted Mr Coles the following year to ask him to help her raise money for Yumanity Therapeutics, a biotech start-up, he agreed. However, he was clear about limiting his engagement with the project. She asked if he would run the company: “But there was no way I was going back into an operating job that soon. Doing a start-up was the last thing on my mind.”
一年后当以前的同事、分子生物学家苏珊•林德奎斯特(Susan Lindquist)联系科尔斯，请他帮助自己为生物初创公司Yumanity Therapeutics（简称Yumanity）筹集资金时，科尔斯同意了。但他明确提出，要限制自己在该项目中的参与程度。林德奎斯特问科尔斯是否愿意执掌公司，他表示：“我做不到这么快就重新回去接手一项企业运营工作。执掌一家初创企业是我当时最不想做的一件事。”广州医药翻译公司。
Within six months he had signed up to become chief executive, with no money, no scientists and no labs.
此后仅仅过了不到六个月，他就同意出任Yumanity的首席执行官，当时这家初创企业没有资金，没有科研人员，也没有实验室。
Ms Lindquist, an academic at MIT, set up Yumanity to commercialise technology she has developed to find new treatments for a group of neurodegenerative illnesses, such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Lou Gehrig’s (a type of motor neurone disease), which are caused by a process known as protein misfolding.
林德奎斯特是麻省理工学院(MIT)的一名学者，她创建Yumanity是为了将她开发出来的技术商业化；这些技术旨在为一系列神经退行性疾病找到新的治疗方法，例如阿尔茨海默病(Alzheimer's disease)、帕金森病(Parkinson's Disease)以及卢伽雷氏症（Lou Gehrig’s Disease，一种运动神经元疾病），这些疾病都是由一种名为蛋白质错误折叠的机制所导致的。广州医药翻译公司。
“As I studied the science in order to help her raise the money, and thought about all the diseases that we would treat, it just became too compelling to turn down,” says Mr Coles.
科尔斯称：“随着我为了帮她筹集资金而学习相关科学知识，并想到我们未来将能治疗的所有那些疾病，出任首席执行官的邀请变得极富吸引力，以至于我无法拒绝。”
He also credits his decision to lead the company to a conversation with his son while holidaying with family friends.
他还将自己执掌公司的决定归功于他在与家庭友人度假期间和儿子的一番对话。
“The gentleman in the couple we were visiting had a mother who had died of Alzheimer’s,” he says. The friend had been “devastated” by the impact of the disease. Mr Coles’s son, then 20, urged him to accept the post: “That was really helpful in pushing me to the edge, on the human side of things.”
他说：“我们造访的那对夫妇中，丈夫的母亲死于阿尔茨海默病。”这种疾病的影响让那位朋友受到了巨大打击。科尔斯当时年仅20岁的儿子强烈要求他接受Yumanity的职位。“此事非常有效地将我推到了做出决定的边缘，让我看到了事情人性的一面。”广州医药翻译公司。
Building Yumanity is a job unlike any other held by Mr Coles, a veteran of big pharma and biotech, who is used to the trappings of larger corporations. “In a big company, you take for granted all of the resources and infrastructure you have around you,” he says. Yumanity, based in the biotech hub of Cambridge, Massachusetts, held its first business meetings at Mr Coles’s kitchen table.
发展壮大Yumanity与科尔斯曾经承担过的任何工作都不一样。作为一名在大型药品和生物技术企业中历练多年的“老兵”，科尔斯已经习惯了大公司的优越条件。他说：“在大公司里，你会将身边触手可及的所有资源和基础设施都当成是理所当然的。”而Yumanity则在科尔斯家的厨房餐桌上举行了首次业务会议。Yumanity的总部设在马萨诸塞州的剑桥市(Cambridge)，这里是生物技术的中心。
“We had nowhere else. You can go to the coffee shop, but that’s risky in Cambridge, because everyone’s in the biotech business.”
“我们没有其他场所。当然你可以去咖啡店开会，但在剑桥市这么做是有风险的，因为这里的每一个人都是生物技术这一行里的人。”
For a while, Mr Coles and Ms Lind¬quist kept the company afloat with their own money, before raising seed funding last year to hire scientists, buy equipment and rent laboratory space.
在一段时间里，科尔斯和林德奎斯特用他们自己的钱支撑公司的资金周转，直到去年募集到种子轮融资以后，才开始招募科研人员、购买仪器以及租用实验室场地。广州医药翻译公司。
Mr Coles felt a big sense of responsibility when asking scientists to swap secure jobs for riskier positions at Yumanity. “Most big companies have enough cash reserves that they never have to worry about making payroll for 20 years. It’s three months or six months at a start-up,” he says.
在请求科研人员放弃安稳的工作、接受Yumanity风险更高的职位时，科尔斯感到了一种强烈的责任感。他说：“绝大多数大型企业都有充足的现金储备，未来20年他们都无需担心是否有足够的钱支付工资。而在一家初创企业，现金储备通常仅够支付三至六个月的工资。”
Mr Coles had a conversation with his wife, in which they agreed they “would personally do anything — now that people had sacrificed and committed their lives — to keep the company going”. Yumanity’s future became more sec¬ure in February, after it raised $45m in a funding round that caused a stir in biotech circles. Mr Coles had rais¬ed cash at a time when investors were fleeing biotech companies amid fears of a bubble.
科尔斯曾与自己的妻子深谈过一次，谈话中他们一致同意，他们“个人将不惜一切代价以保证公司正常运转——因为其他人已经做出了牺牲，并押上了他们的人生”。Yumanity的前景在今年2月变得更有保障了，因该公司在一轮融资中募得了4500万美元，此事在生物技术圈内了激起了很大震动。科尔斯募得资金的时点，正值投资者正因担心存在泡沫而纷纷避开生物技术公司之际。广州医药翻译公司。
It was notable, too, because Yumanity eschewed the venture capitalists that typically support early-stage companies. Instead it sought cash from crossover funds run by institutions such as Fidelity, which invest in both private and public companies, and big drugmakers such as France’s Sanofi and Biogen, the
上述成绩很了不起的原因还在于，Yumanity避开了那些专门支持早期初创企业的风险投资家。相反，该公司寻求资金支持的对象包括：富达基金(Fidelity)等机构旗下那些同时投资上市和非上市公司的交叉基金，还有法国赛诺菲(Sanofi)和美国生物科技集团百健(Biogen)等大型制药企业。科尔斯表示：“风险投资基金所承受的按某一时间表实现收益的压力，会扰乱事情进展。我们希望拥有灵活性，让科学突破、而不是其他人的预算时间表成为推动我们的力量。”
For Mr Coles, 55, Yumanity is the latest stage in a career that has consistently seen him swap larger companies for ever smaller ones.
对今年55岁的科尔斯来说，Yumanity是他职业生涯的最新舞台；在科尔斯的职业生涯中，他曾一次次从大公司跳到规模越来越小的企业。广州医药翻译公司。
After training and practising as a physician, he was headhunted for a job at the drug giant Merck in 1992, having attracted the company’s attention while run¬ning a minority recruitment programme at Massachusetts General Hospital. From there, he moved to a series of smaller companies: Bristol-Myers, Vertex, NPS Pharma and Onyx. “Pretty soon, I’ll be washing glassware.”
在接受了医学训练并从医数年之后，科尔斯于1992年被猎头挖到了药业巨头默克(Merck)就职——此前他在马萨诸塞州总医院(Massachusetts General Hospital)负责的一个少数族裔招聘项目引起了默克的注意。从那以后，他就职的公司规模一个比一个小：百时美施贵宝(Bristol-Myers Squibb)，福泰制药(Vertex Pharmaceutical)，NPS制药公司(NPS Pharma)和Onyx。科尔斯开玩笑说：“很快我就要开始清洗玻璃器皿了。”
Mr Coles is keenly aware that he is one of the few African-Americans in the executive ranks of the pharma industry which, like so many other sectors, is dominated by white men. “I don’t think women are represented proportionately at the upper levels of our industry and I’m confident — bec¬ause I know the other black CEOs and I can count them — that we underrepresent the nation’s black population.”
科尔斯非常清醒地认识到，他是制药行业管理层级别中为数不多的非裔美国人之一。与其他领域一样，制药行业由白人男性主导。科尔斯表示：“我不认为我们行业上层女性的比例代表了整个人口中女性的比例，而且我可以很有把握的说，制药行业的黑人管理层人数也不足以代表这个国家的黑人人口——因为我认识所有其他黑人首席执行官，我能把他们一一数出来。”广州医药翻译公司。
He has tried to make a difference, both through philanthropy and by ad-op¬ting a different approach to rec¬ruit¬ment. “At Onyx we built an executive team that had more women than men and more people of colour than any I’ve ever seen,” he says. Yumanity has just 20 scientists, of which more than half are female.
他曾尝试做出改变，一方面通过举行慈善活动，另一方面通过采取不一样的招聘方式。他表示：“在Onyx，我们打造了一支女性成员人数超过了男性成员的管理团队，并且团队中的有色族裔人数也比我以前见过的任何团队都多。”Yumanity目前仅有20名科研人员，其中一半以上都是女性。
He achieved this by “changing the filters” that companies tend to use when weighing up job candidates: “The only filter we cared about was talent, it wasn’t about what college you went to, how many jobs you had prior, the usual sorts of things.”
他做出上述成绩靠的是改变企业在评价求职者时惯常使用的那套“筛选指标”。他说：“我们唯一关注的筛选指标是才能，而不是你曾就读于哪所大学、你曾做过哪些工作这种老一套的东西。”广州医药翻译公司。
Yumanity has benefited greatly from a renewed interest among life sciences investors in treatments for neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, which traditionally struggle to attract investment. There are hopes in some quarters that an Eli Lilly drug, Solanezumab,could prove to be the first treatment that can stop the progression of the disease, when the company publishes the results of a large clinical trial later this year.
使Yumanity大大受益的是，生命科学领域的投资者对阿尔茨海默病等神经退行性疾病的治疗方法重新燃起了兴趣，而这些领域过去通常很难吸引投资。目前某些研究方向已经显现出了希望，礼来公司(Eli Lilly)一种名为Solanezumab的新药，事实上或将成为第一种能够阻止阿尔茨海默病病情进一步发展的药物，礼来将于今年晚些时候发表一项大型临床试验的结果。
That has helped Yumanity attract financial backers and scientists: “We’re being joined by people who are emboldened or encouraged by the successes that other companies are having,” says Mr Coles. “There’s a halo effect.”
上述情况有助于Yumanity吸引投资者以及科研人员。科尔斯表示：“一些因其他公司取得的成功而倍受激励鼓舞的人正在加入我们。这是一种光圈效应。”广州医药翻译公司。
It is still too early to tell if Yumanity can find a breakthrough for Alzheimer’s or the other diseases it focuses on. Some of the biggest names in pharma have failed, despite ploughing tens of billions of dollars into research. In the meantime, patients must rely on palliative drugs of questionable benefit.
但现在就判断Yumanity是否能在阿尔茨海默病或者其所关注的其他疾病上取得突破，仍然为时过早。某些最知名的制药企业已经铩羽而归，虽然它们在相关研究上投入了数百亿美元资金。与此同时，患者们只能依靠效果可疑的治标药物。
“Some of us have always believed that we will figure this out, it may not be in our lifetime but we will,” says Mr Coles. “These problems are intractable only as long as we stop asking questions.”
科尔斯表示：“我们中的一些人始终相信，我们能够找到有效的治疗方法，或许这在我们的有生之年无缘得见，但我们终将取得突破。只有当我们停止提问时，这些问题才会变得难以解决。”
