He hopes to change culture of institute
The Harvard Stem Cell Institute was hatched three years ago as a scientific enterprise to help revolutionize medicine and cure disease. But institute leaders say it turns out another revolution is required for it to succeed -- one that turns traditional Harvard culture on its head.
Enter Brock Reeve, who was hired last year as the institute's executive director to broker agreements and transform the way researchers at Harvard and affiliate institutions pursue stem cell science to treat and cure disease. Tangible results are critical, Reeve and others say, but to get them efficiently from bench to bedside requires a new level of collaboration.
So far, scientists and others give Reeve glowing reviews. They say the lanky Harvard MBA, and half-brother of the late actor and stem cell research advocate Christopher Reeve, has demonstrated the managerial and diplomatic acumen needed to build a privately funded institute greater than the sum of its diverse and often competing parts.
Although not a scientist himself, Reeve's focused and inclusive approach has helped to bridge differences and create new rules of engagement within and among Harvard schools and more than 750 scientists at 11 affiliated research hospitals such as Joslin Diabetes Center and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, stem cell institute members say. Last week, institute researchers Kevin Eggan and Konrad Hochedlinger , cooperating with other scientists in Boston and Japan, made headlines when they announced new methods of creating stem cells for research.
A married father of three who lives in Concord, Reeve has a resume that includes experience in start-ups, small software firms, and international corporations. He has worked for The Boston Consulting Group, Life Science Insights, SRI Consulting, Viant Corp., and
Reeve, 50, also brings passion to the cause. He became interested in stem cell research during work in the early 1990s with a business client involved in diabetes care, several years before his half-brother was paralyzed by a spinal cord injury. The promise of stem cell research includes curing paralysis, as well as Parkinson's disease -- his father-in-law died from its complications -- and many other illnesses. (His sister-in-law, Dana Reeve, who died from lung cancer last year, told Reeve she was thrilled he had accepted the Harvard post.)
But Reeve said he also took the job because the institute, despite its academic setting, essentially was a start-up that crossed interesting fields of inquiry and required linking academic research, clinical practice, and, ultimately, commercial investment. The institute could create a new research and development business model to take complex technology to market more quickly, he said.
"In the business world, a lot of work I did was getting people to work together across business units," Reeve said. "Because I don't have one particular scientific domain, I'm not tied to viewing things through that lens. And at the same time, a lot of the challenges are not purely scientific, they are also organizational."
That, say his supporters, is one of the key strengths Reeve brings to the job.
"It's a very complex institute and having a business background turns out to be very, very useful," said Dr. Steven Hyman, the Harvard provost.
The institute's first director was a prominent scientist: Charles Jennings, founder of the journal Nature Neuroscience and now director of MIT's new McGovern Institute Neurotechnology Program, aimed at developing new neuroscience technologies. Together with Douglas Melton and David Scadden, the institute's co-scientific directors, Jennings formed a leadership triumvirate loaded with science credentials -- but limited administrative experience.
"We all overestimated the degree to which scientific expertise would be needed," Jennings said. "There are so many scientists, so many competing visions, you didn't really need another voice in the mix in scientific terms."
Among other factors, Harvard's affiliated institutions have different salary structures, fund-raising methods, laboratory equipment acquisition systems, licensing agreements, stem cell ethics committees, and tenure tracks -- which could stand in the way of effective collaboration and scientific progress, Hyman and others said.
"There are so many cultural differences, and my hope is that people like Brock can help us get all of those obstacles out of the way so people can do what we hope they'll do," he said.
One of the recent trickier issues involved negotiating intellectual property rights: how to coordinate investments in ongoing stem cell research with the various institutions and how to jointly market and profit from discoveries. Reeve's supporters say he handled it deftly.
"Pulling the people together under one roof, saying we'll jointly fundraise and we'll make decisions about investing in projects across institutions, the HSCI executive committee is playing an internal venture capital role," Reeve said. "It's the first time Harvard has done that."
The institute, which has raised about $60 million and will eventually be housed at Harvard's planned Allston science campus, is primarily focused on developing treatments for five major disease areas -- blood diseases, cardiovascular problems, cancer, diabetes, and nervous system diseases -- as well as undertaking efforts in fields such as tissue engineering and imaging technologies.
The institute also provides seed grants to research that might otherwise have difficulty receiving critical early funding. It set up a therapeutic screening center to identify drug candidates, and sponsors public forums and seminars about stem cell research, among other programs.
Reeve said the institute, drawing on Harvard expertise, has the additional advantage of being able to go beyond simply supporting lab work to address major social, political, religious, ethical, legal, and financial issues surrounding stem cell research.
Harvard " really is the perfect place to do that," Reeve said. "Everybody has stories that are connected somehow with disease, and few other places in the world have [this] set of resources."
Reeve's success comes as no surprise to Michael Hogan, a New Hampshire-based energy developer and one of Reeve's business school classmates. He's always been a consensus builder, Hogan said.
"He's the person in the room who will sit and listen while other people are more apt to talk first and think second. They'll have their say, and then he'll work to bring people together," Hogan said. "He's just an eminently reasonable and quietly effective guy."
