WILMINGTON — Kris Vaddi always knew he wanted to discover new treatments and medicines from the moment he was 10 years old as he watched his physician father take patients at his clinic in India.
Vaddi would sit quietly and observe his father, completely entranced by the fact he could offer medicine to treat their ailments. He would come to the clinic at least once a week.
“You would see the pharmaceutical sales reps come by and drop off glossy brochures and samples. I would take them all and study them,” Vaddi said. “I never even asked myself what I wanted to do with my life. It was something that I wanted to pursue.”
It’s common for students in India to go to medical school, he said. Vaddi decided to go down a different path and study veterinary medicine. But his keen interest in drug discovery guided him later to a doctoral degree in pharmacology and toxicology from University of Florida.
As a 27-year-old graduate just starting his career, he looked to find a way to break into a research lab, which was difficult in 1992. He found as many postdoctoral fellowship programs as possible in science journals that he could and applied.
DuPont Merck Pharmaceutical Company answered first.
“I didn’t think that I would have a chance. But they called me, and I told them I only had a day to decide, and they were kind enough to offer me a job on the spot,” Vaddi said. “That’s how my move to Delaware happened.”
While DuPont Pharmaceutical would only last for a decade, the experience had an indelible mark on Vaddi. He found the company ahead of its time, with David Martin as its president of research. Martin was credited for pioneering a strong post-doctoral program to fuel the research program at Genetech. Arm-in-arm with the 39 other fellows, Vaddi had the freedom and the budget to do his own research alongside others that were working to discover drugs.
After three years, Vaddi was considered a finalist for an open spot at DuPont Pharmaceutical. But a management change brought in Paul Friedman as the next head of research and development at a time when the company was scrutinizing the millions of dollars spent and the lack of return to show for it.
“Paul wanted to meet me, because signing my paperwork was one of the first offers he would be making. When I arrived, he told me, ‘I’m not going to sign off. So, you should go out somewhere and find another job.’” Vaddi remembered. “I was shocked, because I was making these plans to stay here and my boss just said that my offer was set but there just needs to be a signature. That meant I had to start over.”
That meant moving to Boston, right at the early days of the biotech scene in New England. He joined Proscript, a 20-person startup company in Boston, with limited resources that meant everyone had to work twice as hard to find solutions. It was a blast to Vaddi.
“I love startup life. Even if I left because it was unstable, it was the best time. We were a small team and everyone really carried their part. We knew the company would live and die by what we did,” he said.
While at Proscript, he studied disease signaling, or how the disease responds to other cells and its environment and started to develop molecules to treat arthritis. The molecule turned out to be too toxic for treatment, but Vaddi and his team kept studying it. Eventually, the molecule became Velcade, a cancer treatment for multiple myeloma and mantle cell lymphoma.
Velecade hit the market when Vaddi was no longer involved in its production, and he said that not overseeing its progress until the end is one of his few regrets. But, he added, “where one door closes another opens.”
That door was to a new job at DuPont Pharmaceuticals, four levels higher than he hoped to get the first time. But shortly after Vaddi returned to Delaware, rumors swirled that Bristol-Myers Squibb would buy the company and Vaddi started looking for work again. He was considering Boston again and had serious offers from Princeton University.
Instead, Vaddi decided to take a leap of faith. He, Paul and Steve Friedman and others decided to start their own company. Steve Friedman was vice president of research biology at DuPont Pharmaceuticals and Vaddi’s boss at the time.
“I told Steve, ‘I’m not going to work at this big behemoth of a company. This is my one shot at a start-up.’ And he said ‘Well, take me with you,” he recalled. “We ended up convincing Paul and raised money. We created Incyte.”
Incyte, which now has a market cap of $12.6 billion, started after the former DuPont scientists bought a California pharmaceutical start-up to set the stage. As the years passed, Vaddi returned to the molecule that established Velcade, as he thought there was still another path to go down.
Over years, that research led to Jakafi, Incyte’s top drug that treats a rare bone marrow disorder. It’s a billion-dollar drug for Incyte and the company’s biggest success story, but for Vaddi, it’s about the patients whose quality of life improved since it was approved by the U.S. FDA. To this day, Vaddi still gets thanks from those who had family members who took Jakafi.
In 2011, when Jafaki was officially launched at San Diego, Vaddi found Paul Friedman standing alone – and Vaddi finally reminded him that he rejected him for the job at DuPont. It was 20 years later and Friedman still remembered.
“He said that he didn’t think it would be good for me to work in the same company that I did my postdoc, because they’ll always treat you like a postdoc. ‘You must go out and learn.’ I truly believe that he felt it would be better to find my own way and not take the easy way out,” Vaddi said.
In another full circle moment, Vaddi and Friedman both left Incyte at the same time – Vaddi craved to return to the start-up life and Friedman offered to invest in
Prelude Therapeutics. While the company has 120 people in the first 10 years, Vaddi still describes it as a start-up, just with “critical mass staff to really do something.”
There’s more pressure in being the CEO of a public company in terms of securing the funding from stockholders and investors, but Vaddi says that’s true of every biotech company. The difference is there’s 500 biotech companies listed on the stock market competing for funds and generating noise in the market.
But Vaddi is comforted with his incredible team to rely on when he cannot head to the lab as frequently as he used to. He’s also thankful that Delaware welcomed him with open arms, from his DuPont days to securing the funds from the state to open for business.
“When I was deciding on where to have our research headquarters, amid COVID, U.S. Sen. Chris Coons called me. Where does that happen anywhere else,” he asked. “My career began in Delaware and it will end in Delaware. It’s been tremendously satisfying and fulfilling.”
