Tribute to Tachi Yamada

We lost Tadataka (Tachi) Yamada back in August 2021. While he had a long and storied career and an incredible life, he was taken from us too soon.? I have commented privately to many of you about how he was such a positive influence on me and many others; now I do so publicly. ?

I was fortunate enough to serve under him in three different roles when he was chairman of R&D at GSK. Tachi created a culture of high expectations. His bifurcated leadership style, probably reflecting that he spent his youth in Japan and then moved to the States for higher education and then a distinguished career in medicine, kept us guessing. So, on one day he would be courtly… resolutely conveying his wisdom and making calm suggestions… and the next, advocating his position or challenging yours as the ward’s attending physician on Monday morning medical rounds. No matter which style was manifested, though, he supported you and your team all the way.?

Tachi had an incredible fund of knowledge and was quick on understanding issues at the confluence of business and medicine. Just as he was a marathon runner, he held forth marathon 10-hour portfolio review meetings (almost no bio breaks!) and encouraged everyone to participate in the almost always vigorous debates. Just as he was a mixture of congeniality and roundsmanship, he also admonished us with his axiom, “there’s never enough time to get it right, but always enough time to do it over,” simultaneously pressure-testing our timelines and pushing the tempo. His boss, J.P. Garnier, once paraphrased Emerson stating, “consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” … there you go.

While Tachi was such an accomplished academic and truly a captain of this industry, he could quickly get into it with you on the Boston Celtics or the University of Michigan’s football fortunes. He had a high energy level, hosting an exec dinner into the evening, but showing up and showing most of us up in the hotel fitness center at zero dark thirty the next morning. Our HR leader observed he casted a shadow on the entire GSK R&D organization, in a positive way; he influenced well beyond his immediate circles.

The most notable influence he had on me, and I suspect on almost all of us, was to get us compos mentis, pulling us away from GANTT charts, regulatory strategies, and statistical approaches to think about the higher purpose in what we are doing… he called this the “Focus on the Patient” at GSK. This was back in the early 2000s, and during periodic R&D presentations, he would live interview a patient affected by a disease we were trying to address. Over time, many of us emulated this practice at a TA level and might have interviewed a grandmother whose life was overwhelmed with the burdens of advanced breast cancer, the mother of a child with Lennox-Gastaut, or a young man struggling with HIV. ?So, on any random Thursday, we would have seen Tachi the empathetic physician, Tachi the R&D leader, and Tachi the academic who had a command of the literature and could drop clinical pearls with alacrity.

Since I have been involved with biotech services businesses over the last several years, I have run across many projects that Tachi led, conceived of, or even founded a company based on its promise. Much was via his association with Frazier Healthcare Partners, which coupled productively with the visibility and insights he had on a potentially promising medicine. Each one addresses a significant unmet medical need with a strong scientific rationale. More notable, however, are the leaders involved. Many knew or were similarly mentored by Tachi. We all share a deep commitment to see these things through.

My inspiration for this tribute stems from his enduring positive influence (that very long shadow) that is both imposing and inspiring. There are countless others who may not be working on a “Tachi project,” but still were positively influenced and working productively in this profession by having known him. For all of us, there can be no better professional legacy for him – and no greater honor from us to pay him – than to continue to bring these to fruition.

Tachi comes to mind almost every time I am met with a Nucala commercial and rewind to the debates we had back then about how to best advance the exciting and, at that time, new, IL-5 blocking mAb. I am grateful for having known and worked under him. We honor his memory every moment that we stop to focus on the patient.

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