Why Didn't I Think of That?

At 67 years old, John Holaday’s agile mind is as quick to summon an incisive quotation as it is to deliver a structured and clear explanation of esoteric medical science.  In recalling a career spanning decades as a scientist in the U.S. Army and as a businessman in the private sector, John’s first quotation opens the door into the story of his success, built by thinking of things that no one has thought of before.

“Albert Szent-Györgyi,” John begins, “the Nobel Prize winner who discovered the essential role of Vitamin C in humans in the 1930s, said of creativity and scientific discovery: ‘Discovery consists of seeing what everybody else has seen, and thinking what nobody else has thought.’  In my life, this has meant not just thinking something different, but also finding the way to follow through.  Those who come after you look at your discovery and ask, ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’  That has been a real motivator for me.”

Today, John is the CEO and Managing Director of QRxPharma, an Australian-based commercial-stage specialty pharmaceutical company that is focused on the development and commercialization of new pain management treatments.  At the foundation of the development of these treatments is the wisdom of Albert Szent-Györgyi, and of the long career of John Holaday, himself.

Long before he was the CEO of a multimillion dollar, publicly-traded pharmaceutical company promising a breakthrough treatment for acute and chronic pain, John was commissioned in the U.S. Army in 1966.  Armed with a bachelor’s degree in biology and chemistry and a masters in molecular biology from the University of Alabama, he was first scheduled to fly helicopters.  “That probably would have been the death of me,” John says.  “But due to my resume, I ultimately was assigned to the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, where I stayed for my full army and civil service career, from 1968 to 1988.”

Today, John holds more than 65 patents related to medical science, many of which he secured for the Army at Walter Reed.  “In the Army, they weren’t very experienced at what we now call ‘tech transfer,’” he explains.  “If you’ve got a patent, nobody’s going to come knocking on your door to say, ‘I want to license that.’  You have to go out and find a way to bring patents to patients.”

John’s keen memory stretches back all the way to the first indication of his entrepreneurial instinct, when he was eight years old and he wanted a television set.  “It was 1953,” he recalls.  “My father, being a professor of educational psychology, thought that television sets were a bad influence, and expensive.  He told me that, if I wanted one, I’d have to earn it myself.  So I decided to sell food and drinks to his classes at the University of Tennessee.”

John would take his American Flyer wagon, which he had painted grey with red wheels, to his father’s classes and take orders from the students.  He would then go over to the student union building, fill the orders, and bring them back to the classes.  “I had a fruitcake tin,” John says, “where I’d store my earnings.  I didn’t charge more than what I paid for the items, but I made money in tips.  Working for two summers, I earned $120 and bought an Emerson television set with an 8 inch diagonal screen.  What fun!  That was our only TV for several years.”

A second formative experience occurred later in life when John decided to pursue a career in the medical sciences.  “I had a profoundly important biology teacher in high school who had steered me in this direction,” John remembers.  “My early experiences in managing family illnesses made it difficult for me to witness all of that and be the family liaison to the doctors.  I decided that I could never be engaged as a physician where a patient’s life and death had such a profound day to day impact.”

Through this important realization, John saw that he could have an impact in a different way.  “You can either become a physician and have a great impact with a smaller number of people through direct hands-on intervention, or you can pursue research in the medical sciences, where you can have a different sort of impact on a much larger number of people,” John explains.  “As a scientist, I’ve always been interested in the wisdom of the body, and how we can capitalize on that knowledge to make people more healthy.”

And capitalize, he did.  As a Captain in the Army and subsequently as a senior civil servant, John headed several lines of discovery, including a breakthrough in managing complications due to circulatory shock using opioid antagonists, treating spinal cord injury and changing immune function.  But the Army is not organized to develop drugs, and he left in 1989 to find his fortune in the private sector.

John’s quest to build new drugs caused him to leave his academic career at Walter Reed in 1988, and the first company he co-founded after that, Medicis, was recently sold for about $2.5 billion.  Then, in 1992, he formed a cancer company, EntreMed, in Rockville Maryland, took this company public on NASDAQ in 1996, and served as Chairman and CEO for a decade.  Throughout his career, he has raised over $500 million for companies he has developed and taken public in the US and Australia.

John’s drive to build new companies and new drugs to make a difference in treating patients derives from his passion to push himself to see what others couldn’t, and by his ability to recognize this passion in others.  He continues to live this philosophy, and it ultimately led him to the helm of QRxPharma.

The origins of QRxPharma may be traced back to the origin of a class of painkillers: opioids.  Beginning with the discovery of morphine, first extracted from the opium poppy plant in 1803 by a German pharmacist named Friedrich Sertürner, opioids quickly became the best pain reliever for the treatment of moderate to severe pain.  Morphine and the opioids that followed it, including oxycodone and hydrocodone, found in the brand name drugs Percocet, Vicodin, and OxyContin, are powerful analgesics for acute or chronic pain.  But while opioids are extremely effective at treating pain, they result in several severe side effects: nausea, vomiting, dizziness, constipation, itchiness, and respiratory depression.  “It’s respiratory depression that is of the most concern,” John says, “because that’s the one that’s deadly.”

In the late 1980s, the World Health Organization had indicated in its 1988 international drug convention that medical professionals should not combine two separate opiates in the treatment of pain.  The WHO surmised that the potential danger exceeded the possibility of benefit.  “This was a reasonable fear,” John says, “but it wasn’t science.  It was a public policy decree.”  Nonetheless, in 2002, Professor Maree Smith, a scientist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, ventured to study the possibilities of combining different opioids.

“She combined morphine and oxycodone,” John explains, “and found that they provide synergy in pain relief and lower side effects.  A smaller dose of each, when combined, gave better pain relief than the same amount of either alone.  More significantly, side effects were reduced 75 percent to 100 percent in certain cases.  That’s remarkable.  This has the potential to dramatically revolutionize moderate to severe pain treatment.”

John had specialized in the study of painkillers, particularly opiates, when pursuing his PhD in the field of neuropharmacology at the University of California, San Francisco, in the early 1970’s.  “This was a field I cut my teeth in a long time ago,” John says.  “And it was an opportunity to apply what I had learned.”  Beyond his experience and expertise with opiates, John saw a higher connection to the research.  This scientist had seen something different where others hadn’t, and John wasn’t the only one who recognized this fact.  “Typically,” John says, “putting two already-existing chemicals together would not justify a new patent.  But because the World Health Organization had preached against combining these two drugs, and this scientist did it and made it work, the University of Queensland was granted a composition of matter patent.”

Thus, a company was formed in 2002 that acquired the patents for the morphine-oxycodone combination and other intellectual property from the University of Queensland.  QRxPharma was born, and John came on as CEO in 2007 and took the company public in Australia, initially raising  $50 million.  “So we have a composition of matter patent around two old drugs that we taught new tricks,” John quips wryly.

Over the past ten years, QRxPharma has reached and surpassed many milestones, and with applications before the FDA, the achievement of QRxPharma’s goal cannot be far off.  John’s personal mission won’t end there, however.  His older child is completing his freshman year at the University of Southern California, and his younger child is a junior at Walt Whitman High School.  They are the foundation of his legacy, which is also expanded by a foundation that John and his wife launched and run today.  “Through our foundation, we strive to help educate people in the arts and sciences and give them the opportunity to succeed,” John says.  “We have a few undergraduates at the University of Alabama benefiting from our scholarships.”  The Holadays also support several arts and sciences organizations, such as the Kennedy Center and the National Gallery of Art.

John Holaday has seen financial and professional success, and he has received numerous awards, but the most rewarding aspect of his career is seeing others learn and benefit from his experiences.  With that in mind, he advises young people entering the working world today to engage in the process of observation and critical thinking that will enable them to see what others overlook and make a difference.  “One of the things that I think is important is the evolution of the spirit,” John says.  “By reflecting, synthesizing, planning, and taking action, success becomes not the anecdote you overlook, but the story you think of and live out yourself.”

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