Tachi Yamada / Illustration by Justin Gabbard
Inspiring Lives: Tachi Yamada
Maximizing Impact on People’s LivesIn 1948 post-war Tokyo, Tadataka “Tachi” Yamada asked his parents for a stethoscope for Christmas; he was three years old. His late maternal grandfather had been among the first Japanese doctors educated in the U.S.; his mother passed on to him the belief that life’s highest calling was that of a physician. He was given a real, miniaturized stethoscope.
But after high school in the U.S., Yamada instead followed his father’s interests, pursuing a history degree at Stanford—where, in his senior year, his path doubled back to medicine. He crammed pre-med courses into his final year, and despite slim training in biomedical sciences, thrived in medical school at New York University.
There, he discovered how science drives medical treatment. This led him away from private practice, instead launching 20 years of gastroenterological research. His work pioneered insights into the synthesis and function of gut hormones and discovery of how one of them, somatostatin, regulates gastroenterological functions. While his colleagues studied their physical characteristics, Yamada delved into the then-nascent molecular research on those hormones.
During four years at the University of California Los Angeles he rose from fellow to associate professor. By 1983, he’d landed at the University of Michigan, teaching and heading up a flagging gastroenterology department. Upon arrival, Yamada brokered the cross-departmental alliances needed to apply for a National Institutes of Health Center grant. That money seeded a new facility, the Michigan Gastrointestinal Peptide Research Center, housing what is now one of the nation’s top programs. In his hands, annual research funding jumped from $200,000 to $4 million. Yamada still edits The Textbook of Gastroenterology—because it reaches many students, and therefore, many patients.
These propensities—making career choices based on the widest good, daring to forge new ground, recognizing prospects for synergistic collaboration, shrewd business management—have been the benchmarks of Yamada’s work, consciously so. “Every step…that I’ve taken in my career, I’ve focused on having maximal impact on people’s lives,” he says.
In 1996, Yamada was recruited away from academia into an unlikely realm: a top post in big pharma at SmithKline Beecham. The lure, he says, was the idea of being able to develop medicines that would impact millions of people’s lives. The post would increase his business acumen as he reorganized the newly-merged GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) into small independent laboratories, empowering scientists to pursue novel ideas without bureaucratic impediment. Within five years, the number of new drugs in the pipeline doubled.
But when GSK sued Nelson Mandela over the cost of HIV medicines in South Africa “The realization of what we were doing horrified me,” says Yamada. He urged his fellow board members to consider lowering prices for these desperately-needed medicines and to green-light a new laboratory focusing on drugs for malaria and tuberculosis.
GSK partnered with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on this initiative, Yamada went to brainstorm—and they asked him to take the helm of their global health program. He didn’t hesitate, embracing this new mission “because I believe this foundation, at this time, can have an impact on literally billions of lives.”
Once on board in July 2006, Yamada radically restructured the program. He incorporated pharma’s business model—identifying possible strategies to prevent or treat a disease, developing a product, and optimizing its delivery—within the Gates mission to bring technology-based health solutions to the developing world.
With over $13 billion committed to global health thus far, the Gates Foundation under Yamada’s leadership is helping to shape the strategic direction of the global health enterprise, says Julio Frenk, dean of Harvard’s School of Public Health.
Yamada emphasizes innovation. When he was researching gastric ulcers, it was assumed stomach acids were the cause—until an Australian team discovered that a bacterium was the true culprit. “That kind of paradigm shift is critically important for advancement in science and medicine,” he says. To foster novel insight into intransigent problems—like creating HIV vaccines—Gates launched their Grand Challenges Explorations program in 2008. A year’s funding requires just a two-page application and no preliminary data, and most importantly, says Yamada, eliminates standard peer-review that often edits out unorthodox, original ideas.
Successful projects are woven into larger, five-year research grants, where teams on different continents often collaborate and share data. This, too, lies at the heart of Yamada’s belief that partnering on difficult problems, especially with people holding differing views, ensures depth perception and wider vision.
He is a humble man despite accolades too many to list. What drives him, says Helene Gayle, CEO of CARE, is his personal passion to make a difference. Yamada frames it this way: “It starts with the image that nine million children under five die each year…a city the size of New York filled with children dying each year.”
“I am always going to be focused on how to improve the welfare of people who are suffering,” he says.
Photo: Tachi Yamada / Illustration by Justin Gabbard
