Tony Coles, a veteran biotech executive, is the man behind two multibillion-dollar acquisitions and numerous other board discussions.
But in public, he has undoubtedly been actively pushing the pharmaceutical industry and other business leaders toward difficult conversations about corporate responsibility and race. Those conversations were much more difficult, he told the audience at the STAT Summit in Boston on Thursday.
Coles has been vocal in recent years about issues such as the importance of diversity and the burden drug companies place on patients. Speaking on stage just weeks before the U.S. presidential election, he implored industry leaders not to get tired of debates over drug prices and other types of legislation.
“When we try to serve our people, we get dragged into a quagmire of all sorts of things we have to deal with. We still have great stories to tell, and we should never be shy about them.” he said. “As an industry and as responsible corporate citizens, we must remember what George Merck taught us in the mid-19th century: If you put the patient first, the profits will follow. We have a responsibility to take a step forward.”
In 2017, Coles became a founding member of the Black Economic Alliance, which brings together business leaders from a variety of industries to advance the economic advancement and prosperity of Black communities and elect Black politicians.
He continues to co-chair the bipartisan group.
After years of public debate and private advocacy, Coles remains surprised by the extent to which race has become a hot-button issue for political parties. When the Black Business Council gets involved in local politics, the group sends letters to Democratic and Republican politicians alike. Not a single Republican has responded to the inquiry. Coles recalled one person’s reaction in particular.
“I’ll tell you, this is a very high-profile elected official. He said, ‘Tony, I really want to support this organization; Contains “black”. As a result, I cannot be seen as endorsing anything that includes the word ‘black’. “That’s a direct quote,” Coles said.
Until last year, Coles was chief executive officer of biotech startup Cerevel Therapeutics. The company was later acquired by pharmaceutical giant AbbVie. Although he had resigned from the company several months earlier, the deal was still seen as a major victory for Coles, especially after the failure of his last company, Umanity Therapeutics.
Coles co-founded Humanity with Susan Lindquist, a scientist who studied protein folding and diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. The startup raised hundreds of millions of dollars and went public, but ran out of money in 2022 and effectively dissolved as part of a reverse merger.
Coles said the experience highlighted the importance of keeping a company’s bank coffers full. But he told the audience that Humanity could ultimately be a success story. Lindquist, who died of ovarian cancer shortly after launching the startup, convinced Coles to continue developing Yumanity’s lead Parkinson’s disease drug.
“I went to see Susan the day before she died. She was in a hospital bed, unconscious, and after a few things, she looked up at me and said, ‘Tony, what? “But please, please, patients, please see this drug work,” he recalled.
Mr. Coles persuaded Johnson & Johnson to buy the startup’s Parkinson’s disease drug and continue developing it.
“So time will tell if we are right,” he said. “But if we’re right, that failure suddenly looks like a very important success to the patient.”
