“Real Voices”

“I was born and raised in Tokushima Prefecture, where our head office is located. I have been interested in chemistry ever since high school, and after school I pursued research, earning a bachelor’s degree at Nagoya Institute of Technology and a master’s degree at Tokyo Institute of Technology.
“My completion of the master’s degree coincided with a period when finding a job was very difficult. One of my graduate school professors suggested that, if I could get a job back home, maybe I should do that first and then start looking around from there. I managed to land a job in the Otsuka Group, the leading pharmaceutical manufacturer in Tokushima, and they assigned me to Taiho Pharmaceutical, one of their operating companies. Not long after joining the company, I was sent to study under Professor Eishun Tsuchida at Waseda University Faculty of Science and Engineering. I spent about 12 years there as a researcher working on pharmaceuticals, with a particular focus on the development of new drugs from functional polymers. Eventually, I returned to Taiho Pharmaceutical and was assigned to a variety of roles.
“When I was in the department responsible for nascent research on pharmaceuticals, I was able to observe how start-ups were managed in places such as Boston and San Francisco, where many of the biotechnology start-ups in the United States were based. This was the first time it occurred to me that I might want to try something similar myself. In the R&D division of a large pharmaceutical company, there was little scope for individual flair, and inevitably my ideas as an individual were subsumed into the whole. I was attracted to the freedom I would have if I had my own company, where it would be easy to pursue an idea from inception all the way through to fruition.
“In 2010, at the age of 61, I resigned from my position as director for research and development as approved by a resolution at the annual general meeting of shareholders, and when the time was ripe I founded a business in the same field. With over 30 years of experience and expertise in the field of cancer drugs, I am enjoying the challenge of creating new drugs for cancers that doctors will be able to prescribe to patients in their families with confidence.”

“It is more than five years since we launched, and I consider myself very lucky with regard to the great people I have encountered during this time. A person with experience of working at various biotechnology start-ups in Japan joined the company early on, and he had the task of arranging funding for the business. Within about 18 months of the launch, he had found us five willing venture capital investors, one of which was Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, and that began a wonderfully productive partnership.
“It turned out that our consultant at Mitsubishi UFJ Capital used to work at a drug company, specializing in cancer, and this common ground certainly boosted my confidence in him in our working relationship. The fact that Mitsubishi UFJ Capital had someone within the organization whose expertise is so closely matched to my business speaks volumes about the depth and breadth of talent that they have.
“We have quarterly meetings to discuss business progress. I present him with all manner of facts and figures about our operations, and we look at various proposals and discuss the pros and cons of each. Because we have this common ground of shared experience in the industry, he understands what I say instantly, the meeting goes smoothly, and I am sure that he will give a fair and accurate account of our operations to his superiors.
“Given all of this, the good fortune of having partnered with the right people has been a major factor in the relationship.”