Aspirations, Hopes and Dreams

Dr. Michael Hayden, PhD keeps pursuing his passion

By Kristine Archer

Dr. Michael Hayden, PhD has made a career out of paying attention to things few others even notice.

In an industry that, by necessity and demand, tries to cure both the most common and deadly of ailments, Hayden has chosen to concentrate on addressing the needs of people with illnesses that are just as life-threatening, but low on the industry’s list of priorities.

His latest company, Victoria, B.C.-based Aspreva Pharmaceuticals Corp., just completed a history-making initial public offering (IPO) by following this unique approach. While serving as chairman of the Aspreva’s scientific advisory board, Hayden is still involved in all three of the companies he started since moving to Canada in 1983.

A native of South Africa, Hayden has a passionate, lifelong interest in genetics, a field in which he still does extensive research as director and senior scientist with the Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics at the University of British Columbia (UBC) (Vancouver, BC).

Three Companies, One Vision

Hayden’s passion dates back to his early work in South Africa, where he began noticing what he considered to be a disturbing lack of attention for patients with rare diseases.

“Patients with less common illnesses were very alone or isolated, and somewhat hopeless,” Hayden says. “(They) lived in tremendous darkness — there was very little research and almost no medication for these patients.”

Focused on generating better care for these often ignored conditions, Hayden began examining the possibility of using one person’s genetic blessing to cure another’s genetic curse. Belief in this approach prompted Hayden — along with colleagues Max Cynader, PhD and Frank Tufaro, PhD — to form the first of the three companies he had a hand in creating: Neuro Vir, which was established in 1996 and acquired by MediGene AG (Martinsried, Germany) in 2000.

“Neuro Vir was focused on understanding the herpes virus and its ability to treat patients that had a rare form of cancer called glioblastoma,” he explains. Hayden and his associates developed products using modified herpes simplex viruses (HSV) designed to selectively kill cancerous cells without harming normal tissue.

Hayden again reflects on his early experiences back home when recalling the origins of his second company, Burnaby, B.C.-based Xenon Pharmaceuticals Inc. (which recently changed its name to Xenon Genetics Inc.).

“The first thing I noticed was that there were many patients who had illnesses, (and that) some aspect of the illness would be of use to other patients who had an opposite illness,” he explains. “For example, some of the first patients that I saw in South Africa had a disease of increased bone density — their bones were very thick.

“I just wished I could take a little of the patient with the increased bone density and give some of what caused it to the patient with decreased bone density,” Hayden adds.

This approach became the basis for Xenon, a genetics-based drug-delivery company, which Hayden co-founded with Dr. Simon Pimstone, PhD in 1996, and for which he currently serves as chief scientific officer.

“We realized if we could understand what the mechanism was for the increased bone density, we may be able to use that for drug development for patients with osteoporosis,” he says. “That became a founding principal in Xenon.”

Hayden and his colleagues applied this principal to developing drugs for other indications. To date, Xenon has licensed a candidate for obesity and metabolic syndrome to pharmaceutical giant Novartis International AG (Basel, Switzerland) and selected targets for HDL-cholesterol to Pfizer Inc. (New York, NY).

Hayden points to partnerships such as these as important opportunities for the growing biotech sector.

“The big pharmas bet on these biotech companies to fill various mandates and our role is to make sure we exceed them,” he says.

Old Drugs, New Indications

Aspreva is Hayden’s latest foray into the biotech business world. Its name — derived from the English word aspiration, the Latin word for hope (spero) and the French word for dream (rêve) — epitomizes Hayden’s devotion to underserved patient populations.

“Aspreva is (a symbol of) hopes and aspirations for patients with less common illnesses,” he says. “We felt that through our own kind of scouting, we could find drugs that . . . have decreased risk, by virtue of already being on the market.

“(We thought that) mechanisms that these drugs targeted would be useful for other indications,” Hayden explains.

The company’s lead drug candidate is CellCept — an anti-rejection medication from Collegeville, Penn.-based Roche Pharmaceuticals — which was first approved in 1995. It is currently used as a treatment for heart, renal, liver and pediatric kidney transplant patients. CellCept has been shown in previous clinical trials to reduce incidence of organ rejection by roughly 50 per cent, providing immunosuppression without long-term toxic effects.

Aspreva has initiated Phase III clinical programs for use of CellCept in the treatment of the autoimmune diseases lupus nephritis, myasthenia gravis and pemphigus vulga.

It is novel approaches like these, along with Aspreva’s personal touch, to which Hayden attributes the company’s success.

“We bring the understanding, we bring the clinical expertise — but we also bring the ability to work with families and patients and lay organizations in an effort . . . to understand what these patients need, and to target it appropriately so that it might be useful for these patients,” he says.

Underscoring the company’s clinical successes is the recent closing of its history-making IPO.

“The IPO was the biggest IPO in the Canadian biotech industry,” Hayden explains. “We now have the resources to appropriately target very critical unmet needs with these unique and special medications.”

The more than $100-million IPO will help Aspreva “support the current programs so that we can generate evidence,” Hayden continues. “Patients with less common illnesses deserve the same evidence that the drug they are taking is safe and useful for them.

“They deserve a clinical trial that is rigorous, serious and appropriately supported. And that’s what we’re going to do,” he adds.

Sacrifice and Success

With his hectic schedule and various roles — spanning both the business and academic worlds — Hayden has been forced to make personal sacrifices affecting not only himself but his family as well.

“I regret not being at some of my children’s events — not being at enough baseball and soccer games. I regret having missed some of my kids’ birthdays. I regret not being at as many of their plays and things that I would’ve loved to have been at — but they’ve forgiven me for that.

“That’s a price — a serious price,” he notes. “But you just can’t do it all.”

Hayden recognizes that such a blistering pace may not be sustainable: “If you saw me, you’d say I look about 90,” he says jokingly. But his desire to fulfill his dreams and realize the potential of his work keep him more than motivated.

“I’m not sure I’ll carry on with all of these forever, but I think right now it’s just too exciting,” he says. “It’s just a privilege to play a role here.”

As for striking a balance between academic and business-related pursuits, Hayden advises people to do as he has — “find that passion and stay with it.”

Hayden explains: “I think people have to ask themselves what moves them. There are some people that prefer to be based in the lab and there are other people who want to be on the application side.

“There are pros and cons about being in the industry,” he continues. “The pros are you have the opportunity to move very fast, you have the opportunity to see your ideas be translated into products and services for patients — and that’s fantastic.

“The con is that you don’t always chart your own destiny,” Hayden adds. “Your intellectual freedom isn’t as great as it is within the academic sphere. Your investors, or a failure, can very quickly alter what you’re working on. I think you have to love science in general, but you’ve got to realize that you may not be working on what you’re working on today in three years’ time. You have to be able to tolerate that uncertainty.”

Hayden credits his university and his inherited home with affording him the opportunity to succeed in so many different roles.

“The university has given me time to do all this,” he says. “At UBC, we’re given that opportunity, which may not be possible for me south of the border — to traverse these different roles.”

While Hayden has grown to love Canada, he admits that he originally imagined himself in the United States, where he worked briefly before moving to Vancouver.

“I feel so grateful to this country,” Hayden continues. “I came here from Boston (and) I didn’t think I’d stay long. I was very focused on the United States and didn’t feel I could go back to South Africa, for all sorts of reasons.

“I came here and found myself in a place that gave me the space to be nurtured and supported,” he adds. “I found people that were willing to buy these crazy ideas, invest in them and participate with me in trying to reduce some of these dreams to reality.”

Looking to the Future

Hayden adds that Canada can play a big role in what he deems “the golden age for biology.”

“I think Canada can do it — our perspective, our role as global citizens — all of that can help us tremendously,” he says. “People like to collaborate with us, (they) like to co-operate with us.

“We can bring a very special quality to these interactions,” he adds.

Though Hayden dreams big, he’s quick to point out that scientists must learn from recent history and be mindful of potential pitfalls as this golden age progresses.

“There have been some terrible failures and some terrible side-effects, so we need to be very innovative,” he says. “We need to make sure that we’ve (used) all the value from existing products so that patients can benefit.”

Above all else, Hayden considers himself fortunate to be able to realize long-held hopes.

“For me, this is a dream,” he says. “It’s a fulfillment of something that started out as a commitment to patients with less common illnesses back in South Africa in the ’70s and through three companies. Now, to have some drugs on the market that are truly having impact on those patients — it’s fantastic. It represents the convergence of many of the issues I’ve believed in all my life.”