Variety, passion and the ability to make tangible improvements in people’s lives have propelled John Fowler, co-founder and CEO of Kezar Life Sciences, throughout his career.
Kezar Life Sciences Co-founder and CEO John Fowler/Courtesy of Kezar Life Sciences
Variety, passion and the ability to make tangible improvements in people’s lives have propelled John Fowler, co-founder and CEO of Kezar Life Sciences, throughout his career. A solid sense of humor has helped, too.
Fowler’s path to his current position isn’t even close to being a straight line, but the twists and turns have imbued him with experiences and insights that not only make him stronger but, frankly, make life more enjoyable.
“I’m proud of my winding road to get here,” Fowler told BioSpace. “I think variety is the spice of life. I’m a very curious person and only do my best work when I’m passionately engaged in the subject matter.”
For example, early in his career, he worked as a congressional affairs specialist in the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR), where he helped shepherd the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) through Congress. “Being outside the Senate floor with briefing books, working on trade deals, was invigorating. It was great preparation, in ways I couldn’t have anticipated, for the future. Working with politics and with Congress is the ultimate in building negotiating and salesmanship skills.”
Leaving the USTR, Fowler returned to school, receiving an MBA from Stanford University. “Going back to business school in those years was incredibly helpful. I loved the classes on general management and the entrepreneurial journey.” One professor, in particular, helped him “understand a unique pathway to entrepreneurship and becoming a CEO.”
Fowler launched his entrepreneurial career soon afterward. He bought a shipping company, later founded a company that helped patients reduce their medical bills and fight denied insurance claims, and most recently, co-founded Kezar Life Sciences. “At each stage of my life, each of these areas was incredibly fascinating to me,” he said.
His first experience as CEO truly tested his mettle. What he learned has carried through to each subsequent company.
“Details matter. Operations matter. The company culture matters,” he emphasized, recounting the key lessons. Succeeding often comes down to those basic precepts and having strong, transparent management.
Having a healthy, sustainable corporate culture is important, too. “The company’s culture cam be a long-term sustainable advantage. In shipping, we had no intellectual property, just the strength of our culture and our ability to deliver exceptional customer service. And that was potent,” he said. To achieve that, Fowler helped the team focus not just on customers but on each other. “That collegiality and bonding made our people – and our company – better than the competition. By treating colleagues like our customers, we became family.”
Having transitioned to biopharma, the greatest surprise to him is still “the incredible level of information asymmetry,” he admitted. “I had the naïve belief that good science would get into peer-reviewed journals, everyone would read it, and the value of the data would be more or less evident.” Reality, however, showed it wasn’t that easy. Scopus, for instance, indexes some 35,0000 peer-reviewed journals and PubMed lists some 30,000 journals, so generating attention by publishing in respected publications is challenging. Even within a specific scientific discipline, the complexity is so great that it can be hard to get traction for meaningful stories.
Kezar’s programs, developed by co-founder and childhood friend Chris Kirk, Ph.D., follow the philosophy of hockey great Wayne Gretzky: “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” In other words, the company values innovation.
“Our two programs – KZR-616 and KZR-261, targeting the immunoproteasome and the protein secretion pathway – represent novel, high-science approaches to autoimmune disease and cancer using first-in-class small molecule agents. That’s pretty unique in relation to many other biotechs that are – for example – developing their third iteration of a monoclonal antibody,” he said. More specifically, Kezar is developing small molecule drugs that selectively inhibit important targets that haven’t been targeted before.
KZR-616 is a selective immunoproteasome inhibitor in Phase II trials for dermatomyositis/polymyositis, for which it has Orphan Drug Designation, and lupus nephritis. A Phase Ib trial treating patients with refractory lupus was concluded earlier this year.
Kezar’s other program targets the protein secretion pathway. The first clinical candidate from this program, KZR-261, is a broad-spectrum anti-tumor agent that interacts with the Sec61 translocon and blocks the translocation and eventual secretion of a number of validated targets, including PD-1, PD-L1, and CD47, among others. A Phase I clinical trial began recently.
That’s two programs that have entered the clinic in six years. Thinking back, “the early days were a blast,” Fowler said. “I’m a serial entrepreneur, and I enjoy the swashbuckling process of early-stage company formation. I liked working with friends, even when we were getting more ‘no’s’ than ‘yeses’ from VCs.” During those tough times, “being able to find levity with friends is critical. We enjoyed the journey of fundraising, story-telling and team-building, and we had an early crew that truly believed in our preclinical data and the potential for these novel targets.”
Fowler is still having fun. The secret, he said, “is not to take yourself too seriously. Have a good sense of humor. The journey is about the people and working with a great team toward a shared goal.” To that point, work-life balance is important. With three children between grades 4 and 10, Fowler continues to coach soccer and Little League®. “That keeps me sane.”
He also emphasized the importance of having outside interests beyond family. “I’m a committed outdoorsperson. I prioritize snowboarding and windsurfing, and manage to do a lot of mountain biking year-round with friends.” He also admitted to playing guitar for fun in a local rock band that calls itself ‘Neighborhood Crime Wave.’
For Kezar Life Sciences, “our goal is one you’ve heard a million times: I want to get these drugs approved to help the maximum number of patients possible.”
That goal may have personal roots. “I’m married to a practicing pediatrician and may be jealous of her ability to help people. Maybe this will fill my karmic need.” Whether Fowler was serious or joking when he made that comment ultimately doesn’t matter. He has seen the results of profound unmet needs for years and understands the heart-wrenching frustration of losing someone to cancer. His mother was taken by that disease nearly three years ago.
Now, his company is doing what it can to prevent others from experiencing that frustration before their time, bringing curiosity and passion to novel therapeutic approaches in the hopes of making tangible improvements.
