Do or die

Jim Watson takes a deep breath. “It’s like I’ve been training all my life to do something and this is it, this is what I have to do.”

It’s a good feeling, says Watson, founder of Genesis Research and Development and one of New Zealand’s most famous scientist-turned-entrepreneurs. That everything he’s done in his life, the scientific fields he’s tackled, from steroid hormones to immunology to cancer, has all led to this point.

It took a serious brush with death, a gruesome treatment regime and anger at the way men’s health is sidelined to focus his skills and experiences, leading to his latest venture, Caldera Health, a company set up to tackle prostate cancer.

Watson and his Caldera Health co-founder, Richard Forster, were diagnosed with severe prostate cancer, told their lives would be cut short and subjected to miserable treatment regimes.

Prostate cancer is the second biggest cancer killer for Kiwi men, but diagnostic tools are poor, doctors are divided on their use and treatments are limited. Watson and Forster hope their scientific experience and now intimate knowledge of prostate cancer will change that through Caldera.

Watson was chief executive of Genesis when he started to feel ill. It was 2004 and the biotech company he’d founded 10 years prior had been having a tough time. The development of its leading drug candidate, PVAC, had to be abandoned after disappointing phase II trial results. The share price had slumped to less than $1 — a far cry from its $6 float price in 2000 — and many of the 150-plus staff were concerned for their jobs as Watson and his team fought to regain shareholder confidence. So perhaps it wasn’t surprising when his GP told him he was probably just run down.

But Watson knew he wasn’t fine.

A few months passed and he sought the advice of another GP, had a few more blood tests and again, nothing. By this time he’d developed a persistent limp. “I just felt ill,” he says. Finally Watson sought the advice of the Genesis company GP and, spurred on by high blood pressure results, was put through a battery of tests, including a Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA) test, which measures the level of proteins in the blood produced by prostate cancer cells.

Watson had a PSA result of 987. It should have been under five. His limp was caused by five tumours — one in his spine, one in his thigh, one in his pelvis and two in his ribs.

At the age of 60, he was given four to six months to live.

The first feeling was of shock, he says, both for himself and his family. Given the cancer’s spread, he was given just one treatment option: hormone ablation, or depletion, therapy. Prostate cancer in men is driven by testosterone. The theory is simple: knock out the testosterone and you’ll knock out the cancer cells.

Watson’s a scientist with a background in cancer and steroid hormones, but he was totally unprepared for the affects of hormone ablation therapy, he says. “What probably upset me more than anything is that no one sat me down and told me what was going to really happen to me.”

Again he pauses. Losing your testosterone is like losing a part of yourself, he says. “It’s like someone takes a knife and cuts a piece out of you. It’s sort of emotional, it’s sexual, it’s part of being a man and it’s cut right out. I don’t mean in the macho sense, I mean in the sense that we evolved this way, we developed this way.
“And now dammit, I’ve had hot flushes with the best of them,” he laughs.

Watson didn’t just lose a part of himself in the treatment — his wife left him for another man a few years after he was diagnosed. He’s angry neither he nor his family knew what to expect from the hormone therapy, but then without it he probably wouldn’t have been as driven to start Caldera, he says.

Forster says hormone therapy is “horrible”.

“Every guy’s a walking ball of testosterone and if you interfere with that, you change a lot of their personality, some guys become very depressed, some very aggressive. Jim and I just put ourselves in the mindset that we were going to be really positive about this and maybe that’s because we had a glimmer, even then, that we could do something about this because of our backgrounds.”

Forster met Watson at Genesis. After more than 20 years as a government scientist, studying the molecular genetics of microorganisms in plants, he became chief scientist of Genesis’ plant biotechnology operations at its offshoot AgriGenesis while Watson was CEO. He was heavily involved with Genesis’ early work into producing biofuels from wood fibres — work that later became the basis for another Watson spinout BioJoule — before heading off to found his own biofuel company, LanzaTech, with fellow Genesis staffer Sean Simpson. LanzaTech developed a system for turning an industry waste product, carbon monoxide, into a low-cost liquid biofuel.

Unlike Watson, Forster suffered one of the classic symptoms of prostate cancer, groin pain. He also had a doctor who believed in the PSA test but Forster’s PSA results were low and prostate cancer was dismissed, especially as he was only in his late fifties. His pain was also put down to doing too much at work and on his farm and bloodstock business. “I completely trusted the doctors. I didn’t know what they knew or what they didn’t,” he explains. “Besides, getting cancer’s in your mind, so it wasn’t going to be in my mind. It just wasn’t going to happen to me.”