Tadataka Yamada, a pioneer in drug and vaccine development who helped forge numerous biotech companies and spent six years at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as head of global health, died Wednesday morning of natural causes at his home in Seattle. He was 76.
Endpoints News confirmed Yamada’s death with Seattle venture firm Frazier Healthcare Partners, where Yamada, known as “Tachi,” was a partner.
Yamada was born in Japan and attended boarding school in Andover, Mass., before studying at Stanford and earning an MD at NYU. While he was chair of medicine at the University of Michigan, he was recruited to the company that would become GlaxoSmithKline, rising to head of R&D. He was known there for streamlining drug development and doubling the number of compounds in GSK’s pipeline.
In 2000, GSK sued Nelson Mandela and the South African government over the pricing of HIV medicines, which “shocked and embarrassed” Yamada, spurring him to set up an arm of GSK focused on neglected diseases.
“I proposed to set up a laboratory that focused on malaria and TB, to make medicines without worrying about whether we make money or not,” he told the Journal of Clinical Investigation in a 2012 interview. The Gates Foundation funded much of that work.
Yamada led the Seattle-based Gates Foundation’s global health program from 2006 to 2011, overseeing $9 billion directed at addressing health challenges of the developing world. He left to become chief medical and scientific officer and executive vice president of Tokyo-based Takeda Pharmaceuticals.
“When I left Japan at age 15 to come to the U.S., I made my father a promise that one day I’d come back to Japan,” he told JCI. “I felt that what I learned at the foundation — about urgency, innovation, measuring, and partnering — these things would help the pharmaceutical industry. I actually believe that the pharmaceutical industry is the most important industry in the world.”
More recently, as a partner at Frazier, Yamada co-founded a series of companies, including Phathom Pharmaceuticals, Passage Bio, Scout Bio, and Outpost Medicine.
His involvement in Seattle companies included serving as chairman of the board at Athira Pharma, the Bothell, Wash.-based company that’s been embroiled in a recent controversy over image manipulation by its CEO. Yamada was also board chair of vaccine company Icosavax, a University of Washington spinout which he co-founded and which went public last week. Yamada also served as chair of the board of directors at the Clinton Health Access Initiative.
Remembrances and tributes poured in on Thursday morning.
- “Tachi was a brilliant man, a physician-scientist, and deeply committed to the cause of public health,” said Icosavax CEO Adam Simpson, said in a statement. “I will miss his friendship, his optimism and his dedication, losses that I know are mitigated in some part by the enormous legacy he leaves behind.”
- “Dr. Tachi Yamada was an extraordinary scientist and leader who used his brilliant mind and kind, good heart to improve the lives of millions of people. His work as board chair at CHAI inspired us all the help more people and save more lives. We’ll miss him so much,” former President Bill Clinton said in a tweet.
- “Tachi understood well the many challenges that early-stage biotechnology companies often face when developing disruptive technologies, and always reminded us to consider how the treatments we were developing would affect patients and (more broadly) global health. He is a ‘giant among giants’ when it comes to our life sciences industry,” said Thong Q. Le, CEO and senior managing director at Seattle-based Accelerator Life Science Partners, an investment firm where Yamada was senior advisor and board member.
- “He was a special person who did things to help people. That was his North Star,” his son Takao told the Timmerman Report.
from GeekWire https://www.geekwire.com/2021/tadataka-yamada-1945-2021-pioneer-drug-development-led-global-health-gates-foundation/