Ogilvie's odyssey
June 2009
Discovering drugs is what Donald Ogilvie does. Two of those developed for cancer treatment (Vandetanib and Cediranib), are currently in the final phase of clinical trials, a remarkable achievement.
As fortune would have it, Cancer Research UK’s £8 million initiative to set up a Drug Discovery Centre at the Paterson Institute, within the Manchester Cancer Research Centre (MCRC), coincided with his decision to move on after 20 years in industry. The convergence of the new centre and his career shift could not have been better.
The story gets even more remarkable, because by chance his first job after leaving school in 1975, in a gap year before going to Oxford University to study chemistry, was in cancer research at St Bartholomew’s Hospital Medical School in London. Even then, the die was being cast. His young eyes were opened to the possibility of medical research, especially cancer-related.
The excitement of drug discovery lay many years ahead and came about through structural changes in ICI, later Zeneca/AstraZeneca. He joined the company in 1988, when ICI expanded its diagnostics research facility at Northwich under Dr Alex Markham, later Head of Cancer Research UK.
Due to the vagaries of industry, the diagnostics facility was closed in 1989 and he was transferred to the Biotechnology department in ICI Pharmaceuticals at Alderley Park.
There he used his genetics expertise to work on the causes of a number of diseases – Alzheimer’s, Cystic Fibrosis and Lung Cancer. Later, another reshaping exercise resulted in him being moved to the Cancer Drug Discovery group.
“At last, everything came together and I landed on my feet,” he says. That was in 1993, and was the beginning of 16 years of successful endeavour. He initially worked on a new anti-angiogenic approach to cancer therapy. From being a one-man band working at his bench, he progressed to leading large multidisciplinary drug discovery teams and running a 100-strong Bioscience department.
Talking to him gives one a sense of the excitement and the potential disappointment of attempting drug discovery. “You have to have the mentality for it,” he says. “Most projects stop. You have to take a long-term view and it tests your patience. Your job is to provide high quality scientific data so that decisions can be made about the progression (or not) of a project – and only one in a hundred make it to deliver a drug.”
In terms of drug development and the high investment needed to get a new drug to market, he draws a useful analogy with the Grand National – most of the horses won’t finish, you have to decide which to back and which to pull up, and you know that an outsider can win.
In his own case, the two compounds, Vandetanib and Cediranib, were discovered about ten years ago but they still have a few more hurdles to jump before they can be sure to go into circulation.
Ironically, it was another bout of AstraZeneca reshaping which enabled him to take up his new job. “The UK cancer drug discovery group was being downsized and the company was offering voluntary redundancies. After my initial dismay at this turn of events and much heartsearching I began to see that this was an opportunity to start out all over again and decided it was time to move on. In parallel, the chance to be involved in a new cancer drug discovery venture in the MCRC was irresistible.”
So, things seem to have come together and he’s landed on his feet again. His job is to set up the new centre, oversee the setting up of new state-of-the-art labs, recruit first-class biology and chemistry leaders and get drug discovery projects off the ground.
The aim is to generate a portfolio of cancer drug discovery projects, whilst spreading a drug-hunting culture and developing chemical research tools for the MCRC.
“Located in the Paterson Institute, adjacent to The Christie, we have the double advantage of being close to the people most likely to benefit from our discoveries, Christie patients, and being able to tap into the scientific strength of the University,” he says.
Now 52, Donald can trace a journey that seemed destined to bring him to this place. He has an easy-going manner and an informal amiability, but he is a no-nonsense leader with a clear-minded vision. Even in his early days, he knew his own mind: taking that transforming gap year to work at Bart’s after school; determinedly switching from Chemistry to Biochemistry at Oxford and deciding on graduation to get a job rather than stay on to do his DPhil. (He did complete his DPhil later, but he did it the hard way – working by day and writing his thesis by night).
His first jobs were in the Pathology Department of the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, where he spent four years looking at the role of proteases in breast cancer and then another four elucidating the genetics of inherited human bone diseases with Dr Brian Sykes. “They were productive and exciting years, a real education in a clinical environment,” he says. Then came ICI/Zeneca/AstraZeneca – a huge opportunity to learn and grow and work with many world class scientists.
Oxfordshire was also the place where he met his wife, Carol. They have two teenage children, Sarah, 17, and 16-year-old Joshua for whom Donald serves as a part time, unpaid, taxi driver. The family belong to SMCF, a large church in Sale, for which Donald is a Charity Trustee and he also enjoys gardening, walking, reading (all sorts) and cryptic crosswords.
So, his new role has an added bonus. “When I was looking for a new job, the field was inevitably very narrow, so it was amazing to find the perfect opportunity only five miles from home.”