Steven Yatomi-Clarke didn’t take the obvious route into his role as a biotech leader. A scientist by training, specialising in biochemistry and molecular biology, he brought a talent for interpreting science jargon for investment bankers and an eye for “what not to do” in business to bear on his role as CEO of Prescient Therapeutics Ltd (ASX:PTX).
Yatomi-Clarke has had one foot in science and the other in commerce for his entire career. He chose to lean into his talent for the latter after observing his university Honours supervisor uproot his family and move cities to chase a grant. “I thought, screw this, if that’s your reward for being an expert, no thank you!”
Where commerce meets science
“I was still drawn to science but I didn’t want to be stuck at a bench,” he told Proactive. “I knew I didn’t want to be a doctor roaming the halls of a hospital but I did want to be helping patients. I was drawn to the business side of science and I thought, well maybe I can make a difference on that side.”
Fresh out of university, Yatomi-Clarke focused his energies on the commercialisation of scientific ideas and ended up in investment banking working with healthcare companies. “Half the time I was just a translator between scientific founders and blank-faced investors who didn’t really speak the science,” he said.
For around 15 years he gave hands-on advice at board level – a period he describes as “like doing a perpetual MBA course” because of what he was privy to while working with these companies.
“What I loved was being able to see what other people couldn’t see and I quickly established quite a niche for myself, identifying the good opportunities and avoiding the bad ones, especially in a fairly opaque industry like healthcare.”
Tapped on the shoulder
Yatomi-Clarke was on the verge of setting up his own biotech fund when he was tapped on the shoulder by Prescient, where he was already a non-executive director, and asked to step into the role of CEO, initially in an interim capacity.
Sceptical at first, he tentatively looked under the bonnet of the oncology biotech, which was going through a bumpy transition. “The more I looked over things I thought ‘wow, I could really do something with this company’,” he said.
Six or seven years later, the company is going from strength to strength.
“We acquired a brilliant new technology and we’ve really got the wind at our backs with momentum on almost every front, which is a nice place to be – very satisfying.”
Challenging the pace of change
Yatomi-Clarke loves his industry but he is frustrated by the historically slow pace of change, particularly in his company’s field – oncology. He calls the phenomenon ‘incrementalism’.
“It’s the approach that has guided the industry for decades along the lines of considering it a success to extend patients’ lives by a few more months or sometimes a few more weeks, not to mention the poor quality of life. And then the industry seems content to celebrate small incremental improvements. Well, I reject that,” he said.
“I don’t think we’ve been aiming high enough. But thanks to some new technologies it’s about making a difference, not a dent, and having a genuinely curative intent with some of these diseases, which I think is what patients deserve.
“The thing that bothers me is that it is so easy for companies to fall back onto incrementalism, which is a natural disposition in Australia – because you’ve got to be conservative. Your shareholders and investors are conservative – and they determine your valuation and provide your funding. So, unfortunately, a company’s natural inclination is to reject often brilliant ideas that can be quite valuable and revolutionary and have the potential to really move the needle for patients.”
“I think that’s starting to change but historically that’s what has really bothered me. Everyone just hugs the middle.”
A certain amount of fatalism can creep into discussions of what biotech companies can achieve. Cancer in particular has long been the final frontier, the holy grail, in healthcare and companies are reticent to say they’ve got a cure. There is also a notion that it’s a crowded market and loads of competitors are trying to do the same thing.
“There are a lot of unsolved problems out there in healthcare,” Yatomi-Clarke responded. “Companies shouldn’t pit themselves against one another. They’re not the enemy – we’re not the enemy – cancer is the enemy. In the case of cancer, 10 million people are dying every year. That’s 100 million people over a decade. Any problem of that magnitude deserves our best efforts.”
Differentiating the solution in a crowded market
“We’ve got two approaches: targeted therapies addressing the inside of cancer cells; and cell therapies targeting the outside of cancer cells. Our targeted therapies are our foundational assets and they target mutations on the inside of cells – they’re designed to switch off problematic proteins that drive cancer,” Yatomi-Clarke said. “So they take a personalised medicine approach.”
One of the company’s assets has had success with breast and ovarian cancer, and is currently targeting AML.
The other drug targets T-cell Lymphoma (TCL).
“Some of these patients have no business being alive, but they’re still on therapy and they’re still alive,” said Yatomi-Clarke. “One patient was expected to have just a few months to live and she’s two years out now with her cancer held at bay. We’ve had four complete remissions with our other drug as well.”
“The fact of the matter is there are people walking around now who shouldn’t be alive, but they are because of our trials, which is really rewarding. You don’t get that in investment banking.
“In the investment banking world, a good day was people making money and a bad day was people losing money.
“A good day for me now is another patient gets a benefit, a bad day unfortunately you lose a patient. The stakes are a lot higher but it’s ultimately more rewarding.”
A unique CAR-T platform
CAR-T therapies are relatively new and at the moment they’re not easy to deliver en masse, and have a number of inherent problems. Prescient is changing this script by making these living cells druggable with a unique platform called OmniCAR.
“At the moment these cells are super expensive and bespoke and once you’ve injected them that’s it, you can’t change them or control them – you cross your fingers and hope for the best," the CEO said.
“Our platform is modular, like a Lego set. You can control the cell by remote control. You can tune it up or down, switch it on or off; even redirect it from one cancer to another, like a little robot if you like.
“And that’s not been done before. To make it druggable and giving the doctor full control of the activity and the target is something really unique and that’s going to make it broadly applicable to many more cancers, it’s also ultimately going to drive down the costs.
“We’re very excited by it and it’s certainly turning a lot of heads.”
The platform can work with off-the-shelf cell types. It can also be combined with another Prescient cell manufacturing technology, CellPryme, which produces more “youthful” cells for better, longer-lasting tumour killing.
“The good news is that cell therapies for cancer, like CAR-T, are as expensive and clunky now as they’re ever going to be, and they’re only going to improve – like car manufacturing was before mass production.”
Building a successful small-cap biotech
Yatomi-Clarke is emphatic about partnering with experts. “When it comes to technology development, we license from the best and work with the best. We have piggy-backed on institutes like Oxford and Yale and the University of Pennsylvania – you couldn’t hope to replicate that expertise.
“So partner with the best and work with the best, including the best local talent you can find.”
The next tip? Get some real problems – and solve them. “You have to be solving a real problem and your solution has to be truly differentiated,” Yatomi-Clarke said. “A lot of businesses think they’re differentiated when they’re not.”
“If your solution is very similar to other solutions then you’re going to have a lot of trouble standing out, attracting the right sort of people and attracting the right sort of funding.
“More to the point, when it comes time to prove your technology, you now have to prove that it’s superior to these competitors and then you’re starting downtown and that’s not really where you want to start.”
The last point is nebulous but no less important – stand for something.
“Your company’s got to have a proper mission. That sounds a bit touchy feely but people working in small cap biotechs don’t want to be a cog in a big machine, they want to understand the mission of that company and where they sit in it and the value they bring as the company continues on its journey – to feel that their expertise is really making a difference.
“A lot of companies aren’t great at articulating their mission, what they stand for and what they’re going to do.”