From his office looking out across San Francisco Bay, New Zealand bio-scientist and entrepreneur Graeme Fielder is playing his part in combatting some of the world's rarest life-threatening diseases.
Working with leading scientific and business brains in the field of gene therapy, Fielder is building his expertise with fast-growing biopharmaceutical company Audentes Therapeutics. But his long-term vision is to return home to New Zealand and make an impact with a biotechnology enterprise of his own.
Although he had to go to the United States to "learn what I couldn't learn in New Zealand", the award-winning Fielder believes the country he calls home is making its mark as a world leader in niche areas of engineering, science and technology.
"New Zealand is very well placed to make global companies that are knowledge and technology driven. We are currently doing well in specific niches and I'm confident we will continue to produce companies with hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue in these very niche spaces in the future," he says.
Fielder says merging his two passions - science and business - will give him the necessary skill set to create his own successful company in New Zealand. He credits the "early fusion" of those two disciplines at the University of Auckland with shaping his career.
With an honours degree in biotechnology from Auckland, Fielder did his PhD in molecular medicine through the Liggins Institute; he investigated the role of novel genes involved in breast cancer.
Intrigued by the potential to commercialise breast cancer technologies, he introduced himself to the world of business. He became CEO and chair of the University of Auckland Business School's student-led entrepreneurial development programme, Velocity. He also led Chiasma, another student organisation linking the academic community with New Zealand's biotech industry, and is still a board member.
"It was fantastic I was able to dabble in the business space without having to do a formal conjoint degree," he says. "It gave me opportunities to exercise that part of my brain, even though I was in the lab 24/7. I learned a lot about business - how to start a company, what a good business idea looks like.
"Those opportunities to cross-pollinate while I was at university were very important, and very much shaped my career. I was never going to be a professor; I was always going to be in this translational, fusion space of science and business."
Recognised as an emerging business leader, Fielder won a Fulbright Award to study for an MBA at Stanford University in California: "When I went into my MBA programme, I was one of only five people out of 400 with a PhD. It's a rare combination."
During his time at Stanford, Fielder started up a biopharma company, Mesopharm Therapeutics, with fellow University of Auckland medical research graduate and award-winning post-doctoral scientist, Dr Francis Hunter. They won the 2014 global Breast Cancer Start-Up Challenge with a plan to commercialise technology developed to treat solid tumours.
The six-person team led by Fielder and Hunter attempted to start the company and were accepted into the OneStart Biotech Bootcamp, but after discovering the technology needed to "incubate longer in the research environment", they decided not to pursue it further.
"It was unfortunate but you have to ask yourself how valid is the science, how wide is the gap between where the technology is to what needs to be done to raise the money? I still got a lot of value from it; in the validation process you talk to many venture capitalists and pharmaceutical companies and build up your own network," Fielder says.
He continues to build his expertise as senior manager of corporate development at Audentes Therapeutics in San Francisco; it focuses on the development and commercialisation of gene therapy products for people with rare, life-threatening diseases.
"My role is a combination of understanding the depths of the science and how the company can continue to leverage it, in the form of new therapies," he says.
Fielder is working on developing a treatment for X-linked myotubular myopathy (XLMTM), where children are born with a gene mutation resulting in a lack of a protein that gives muscles strength.
"They can't move or breathe and there is no treatment for them," Fielder says. "We've developed, and are hoping to clinically test, a gene therapy using a non-disease-causing virus to insert this gene back into their muscle cells to start making the protein again."
The rapid success of Audentes is a great example of "how quickly things can move with very good leadership and science," says Fielder. In just three years of operation, Audentes has raised over US$200 million and is now listed on the NASDAQ.
"Collectively across my MBA learnings, my experience with Metapharm and with Audentes, I know you have to find very good science, which has to be on the world stage. You have to think big and execute fast," he says.
To start his own business endeavour, Fielder will look for "ground-breaking science - something that's not a 'me too'."
"I'm of the mindset not to let something flounder around. You have to get it started quickly and make it attractive to overseas investors - it's not realistic to expect it to be completely funded in New Zealand. Having access to the best people in the world is huge too," he says.
"I'm pretty optimistic it can be done in New Zealand, which is why I'm heading back. I've put myself in a position that I'm able to contribute to New Zealand in a meaningful and impactful way."