San Diego biotech company Vividion Therapeutics looks to make small molecule science do big things — very big things, such as identifying new therapies to fight devastating diseases and illnesses, such as cancer and autoimmune disorders.
Founded in 2014 by a trio of decorated Scripps Research Institute scientists, Vividion Therapeutics develops chemical tools that target disease-causing proteins that have proved resistant to drugs and find treatments to extend and enhance the lives of people suffering from those ailments.
“We can now drug the undruggable,” is the way chief executive officer Jeff Hatfield puts it. Hatfield is this year’s winner of the Top Workplace leadership award for a midsize company.
Vividion made headlines last year when, after the company announced plans to go public, German pharmaceutical giant Bayer bought Vividion in a deal worth as much as $2 billion. Both sides said the deal will protect Vividion’s culture of innovation.
Since the acquisition, the company’s staff, which includes some of the brightest minds in science, chemistry and biology, has expanded to 170 employees.
Hatfield, CEO since November 2020, talked to the Union-Tribune at Vividion’s headquarters in Sorrento Valley. The interview has been edited for space and clarity.
Q: What goes into your thinking about leadership?
A: First, envisioning the future — thinking about the opportunities that exist, the risks within any given business, but also, what are the bold opportunities? The second layer is getting the right people in the right places to be able to fulfill that future. I think that motivating and empowering is a leader’s job.
And then last is to just clear the roadblocks — problems inevitably come up that ultimately only the leaders can solve. I think those elements are really the essence of leadership.
Q: You got your bachelor’s degree from the Purdue University College of Pharmacy and then earned a master’s in business istration from Wharton. Now you’re the CEO here at Vividion. What’s the journey been like?
A: My experience in the life sciences industry is almost exclusively filled with people who have, at their heart, a desire to make things better. Those are the people I get to work with — people who put mission first, the rest of the world first, and do their best to try and achieve that. It’s very gratifying.
Q: Does that make your job as CEO easier because people already have motivation or does it make it harder because these people have motivation and they want to see results?
A: There are three trademarks that exist in our culture here. It starts at the grassroots and after having focus groups with different individuals, what people nearly universally come back to are three things — purpose, innovation and collaboration.
There are some companies where it might be easy to feel like, “Well, I’m not really important to what we do” or “I just do this little thing.” I think people here can feel like they’re really part of those solutions. I don’t even know how to put words to it, but something earth-shattering within the scientific field, of being able to do so much to change the success rate of our life sciences, of our whole industry. How many people get to change not only people’s lives, but the industry they work in too?
Q: For so long, people have tried to find a cure for cancer and autoimmune disorders. Are you confident that’s going to happen and this company can be at the forefront of that?
A: I think we will absolutely achieve that with new approaches to discovery and new understandings of cancer. Right now, physicians have an idea for a lot of patients who walk in the door, but they only have drugs for 10 percent of those solutions. The other 90 percent, we don’t have the answer. Vividion is going to change that ratio, I think.
