Chasing big dreams at LifeX
South Side incubator filled with startups determined to conquer devasting medical challenges
Old friends, one American, one German: Silicon Valley dads on a weekend camping trip with their kids.
There was a pickup game of football on a beach. Neither guy was picked.
The German, Stefan Roever, knew nothing about the game. The American, Dietrich Stephan, was too bookish.
The two struck up a conversation as other dads called plays in the sand. They bonded over free enterprise and human genetics.
Spool ahead 10 years, and the two friends are trying to keep an aggressive brain tumor from killing Mr. Roever.
He was diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme two years ago. It often kills quickly.
The odds of beating the cancer are not good, longer still when you consider that the two friends define success as changing the way doctors practice medicine. When the men met after Mr. Roever’s diagnosis, they quickly ruled out following the standard treatment
The cutting edge
The fear, the cost, the drama of venturing into unknown territory
regimen for the disease, which has dismal results and has changed little in a decade.
“If someone you care about had cancer, what would you want?” said Mr. Stephan, 49. “And if we can solve it for one person, why wouldn’t you do it for everyone?”
The question gave birth a year ago to Navio Theragnostics, which has offices on the South Side and in San Francisco. Mr. Stephan, Mr. Roever and others were founders. Mr. Roever was the first client.
Navio’s second client was former British Parliament Member Tessa Jowell, who had the same type of brain tumor as Mr. Roever.
She died in May, eight months after diagnosis.
Instead of choosing standard treatment for the disease — surgery, radiation, chemotherapy — Navio wants to change the practice of medicine by linking patients like Mr. Roever to scientists, cutting-edge research and clinical trials, all guided by the specific genetic signature of the patient’s tumor.
Navio wants to be Waze — the driving directions app — for cancer, plotting a course based on individual needs.
To start, Navio’s services will be available only to people of means. But Mr. Stephan said it will eventually become the standard of care.
“Our aim is to get it to everybody who needs it,” he said.
An ambitious undertaking
Mr. Stephan is CEO of LifeX on the South Side. LifeX Labs is a year-old nonprofit meant to help companies use research to create medical therapies.
LifeX is a first-of-its-kind effort for the University of Pittsburgh, which funds the organization. In addition to the university and its Graduate School of Public Health, LifeX Labs is supported by the Henry L. Hillman Foundation.
“The revolutionary solutions we develop have the potential to alleviate mass suffering and death on a global scale,” LifeX’s ambitious mission statement reads. “It’s our mission to significantly reduce global disease burden.”
LifeX Capital, an independent entity also on the South Side, provides equity financing to support the lab’s life science startups. The first distribution of funds is expected early next year.
Mr. Stephan discovered biology in high school, which turned into a love affair lasting into his 30s. Growing impatient, he decided that academia wasn’t bettering the world fast enough.
“You can sit around all day and think great thoughts,” he said. “What’s the point?”
He turned to serial entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley at a time when academia viewed private enterprise as a sellout. He returned to Pitt several years ago as chair of the Department of Human Genetics at the Graduate School of Public Health after founding several life sciences companies.
Like Navio, many life sciences startups are often born out of a reckoning with despair.
Mr. Stephan, who grew up in Fox Chapel, was 7 years old and
his sister Mariam was 5 when their mother died of breast cancer. She was in her early 30s.
Several years later, Mr. Stephan’s father, then a 35year-old endocrinologist, was found on the floor of his office after having a seizure. A scan revealed a brain tumor the size of an orange, which required 14 hours of delicate surgery to remove.
“We were waiting for him to come home,” Mr. Stephan said. “He just never came home.”
The tumor was benign, but he wasn’t the same after the operation. The father who used to spend dinner conversations fretting over his patients with his two young children soon retired on disability.
Without family living nearby, Mr. Stephan and his sister were pretty much left alone to raise themselves as their father struggled through depression. Mr. Stephan remembers a “rudderless childhood.”
“Loss always puts things into perspective,” said Mariam Stephan, an associate professor of art at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and a painter who has shown her work internationally.
About her brother, she said, “Both of those experiences matured him more quickly than his peers.”
Mr. Stephan said his childhood taught him two things: Doctors aren’t gods, and life is fragile. The second lesson may explain his impatience.
Mr. Stephan majored in biology at Carnegie Mellon University for his undergraduate degree, setting him up years later for a three-year fellowship at the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health. His sister remembers her brother, then in his early college years, lighting up with the realization of how genetics could one day guide medical interventions.
“At the time, I could see the wheels turning — ‘how do we apply these things,’” Mariam Stephan said. “He was suddenly wide open, full of potential.”
It would be 10 years until the human genome would be sequenced, unlocking the potential for new cures.
“These companies are developing transformational products that will make a difference to patients.”
Slow path to breakthroughs
Despite the promise of understanding the interaction of genetics and environmental factors in causing diseases, therapeutic breakthroughs have been slower to be realized than many had thought 20 years ago.
Cancer, for example, is not one disease, but thousands.
And today, the hundreds of gene variants associated with something as simple as a person’s height are still poorly understood. So much more complex are the genetic and environmental interactions that cause heart disease, asthma and
— Diego Miralles, physician, LifeX advisory board member and CEO of Vividion Therapeutics
cystic fibrosis.
Mr. Roever, who was 51 when he was diagnosed with brain cancer, is an economist, a lawyer and a startup investor.
He co-founded Genia Technologies, a company that makes rapid DNA sequencing systems, which he sold to Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche in 2014 for $350 million.
Genia Technologies came up early in conversation after Mr. Roever and Mr. Stephan met on the beach that day.
“He asked what I did, and I said I’m in genetics,” Mr. Stephan said.
“Oh, really,” Mr. Roever said. “I work for a company that’s making a new DNA sequencing machine.”
“It was random,” Mr. Stephan said. “He knew nothing about DNA sequencing. I was blown away by what they were doing.”
Mr. Stephan became Genia’s first scientific adviser.
Two years ago, after the sale of his company to Roche, Mr. Roever was on an exercise bicycle at a fitness center when he fell to the floor with a seizure. The brain cancer diagnosis followed.
Therapeutics in Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh had Jonas Salk, the father of the polio vaccine, and organ transplant pioneer Thomas Starzl. But the city never became the drug development hub that Cambridge-Boston and New Jersey did, making it all the more remarkable that 10 of the 16 LifeX companies are working on drugs to cure some of the most difficult scourges: Alzheimer’s, Huntingdon’s and antibiotic-resistant bacteria, something that’s expected to claim more lives than cancer by 2050.
“Yes, Virginia, Pittsburgh does therapeutics,” said Scott Sneddon, president and CEO of LifeX portfolio company Sharp Edge Labs Inc., a startup that identifies compounds that can fix the genetic cause of diseases. “A lot of people just don’t know it.”
What entrepreneurs know intimately is failure. Nine out of 10 startups crash and burn, which means success is only possible after overcoming the odds.
In the life sciences startup world, the euphoria of making the world a better place mixes with the white-knuckled ride of lab tests gone awry, funding that evaporates and a wall of regulatory hurdles.
The LifeX companies focused on therapeutics could hardly face longer odds: Fewer than 1 out of 10 new drugs gets approved, according to one study, and the cost of getting just one drug approved is a staggering $2.6 billion, according to another study.
Mr. Stephan is stoic about the odds, reminding LifeX company principals at a recent meeting that when things turn hard, focus on the people who would be helped by their work.
“When you’re feeling weak, which I do almost on a daily basis,” he told them, “this is a way to get your head back into the game.”
Mr. Stephan said he is often told that what he’s trying to do at LifeX is impossible.
“I simply don’t accept that,” he said. “It’s hard, and there are problems that we’ve had a long time. If you don’t try, you’ll never succeed.”
The structure of LifeX, which works to translate scientific research into medical services and products, has worked well elsewhere, said Diego Miralles, a physician and LifeX advisory board member, who watched the paradigm work as head of an entrepreneurial team within Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson.
“What they’re doing is creating an environment for companies to thrive,” said Dr. Miralles, who is now CEO of San Diegobased biotech Vividion Therapeutics.
“It’s based on a model that has been highly successful. This is about building real value. These companies are developing transformational products that will make a difference to patients.”
Accepting the challenge
In the meantime, Mr. Stephan says Navio is raising Series A funding, and Mr. Roever’s tumor seems to be stable.
The team of scientists and doctors attending to him meets weekly in a video conference to review his progress and tweak the treatment regimen. Eventually, Navio will use machine learning to guide individualized treatment plans for people facing serious diseases.
Faced with the long odds of beating the cancer, Mr. Roever was feeling down when Mr. Stephan visited him in California shortly after the cancer diagnosis.
Matter-of-factly, Mr. Roever said that he’d had a good life, that he’d done what he wanted.
Mr. Stephan answered by saying it wasn’t over yet, that he saw a “real chance to get through this.” Mr. Roever relented finally, agreeing to take on the challenge.
“And let’s do our best,” Mr. Stephan told his friend.