During a childhood hanging out at the railroad yards in a working-class neighbourhood of Hull, England, a wide-eyed David Cox would marvel at the men who manned the locomotives.

Cox never did get behind the controls of the engine but, in a sense, he is living the dream – in the driver’s seat of Synsorb Biotech, a Calgary-based pharmaceutical company that may be on the verge of an important medical milestone with its lead drug, Synsorb Cd, a potential treatment for recurrent C. Difficile Associated Diarrhea.

Indeed, Cox has come a long way from the railroad yards.

1. What was it like growing up in England in the 1950s and 1960s?

“It was a blast. I come from a working-class family. My dad was a lowly-paid, hourly-paid worker in mining. So I hung out with working-class kids. Those guys were kind of mischievous but a lot of fun. I found that – I guess it sounds kind of conceited – but I was smarter than the average kid. I wound up in a situation (at age 12) where I was one of only two children in the city of Hull that was given a scholarship to go to a public school, which was like a private school is here. So I was in this cloistered environmental, a poor kid mixing with rich kids. It was not without its joys, but not without its challenges.”

2. What was your boyhood dream?

“I wanted to be a railroad engine driver. Everybody wanted to be an engine driver. The track went right by our house and I used to hang out at the railroad yards. I used to look at those huge steaming machines and I thought: ‘What could be better than sitting behind the wheel of one of those things?’ As time went by, when I was 12, I decided I wanted to be a physician. I actually started medical school, but switched to microbiology after a couple of months. And that’s what my mother (Irene, 86) wanted me to be. She was very disappointed.”

3. So why didn’t you become a physician?

“I graduated from high school at 16 and I was too young to go to university. So I took a year off from school and worked in a hospital environment. The hospital environment and the medical profession in the U.K. in those days was very elitist. Don’t forget, I just had this experience of having the first half of my life in a working-class environment and the second half in a much more cloistered environment.”

“So I had one foot in each camp, having seen the best and worst of both sides. But the medical profession was dominated by upper middle-class people, mostly males, and I didn’t like the way the doctors treated the other people in the hospital. I didn’t like the arrogance. So I thought if you put a relatively normal human being through six years of medical school and he comes out as Lord-knows-what at the other end, what’s the point? So that’s why I switched to microbiology.”

4. Who has been the greatest influence on your life?

“My mother. She always says, to this day: ‘I never learned anything yet by talking.’ And that taught me to be a good listener.”

5. Have you had a role model or mentor?

“Chris Price, a former Labour MP in London. For a young lad in his 20s to run into an MP was a big deal. He took an interest in me and gave me a whole pile of great advice over six months. He shaped me as a professional man, in a non-scientific sense, how to conduct yourself, how to get things done, how to get people on your side. He was very eloquent and sophisticated and a gentle man.”

6. What led you to Canada in 1988 to head the microbiology department at the Alberta Research Council?

“I thought it would be very cool to work overseas. While I was working in London as head of an academic department, I was headhunted by PriceWaterhouse to work for the ARC, but at about the same time I was offered a job in Hong Kong. But when you look with some rigour at Hong Kong vs. Canada, Hong Kong finishes third. When I came out here for a look-see visit, it was done.”

7. What’s the most important business lesson you’ve learned?

“The thing that keeps popping into my mind when I think about my answer is that everything takes twice as long and costs four times as much than what you think it’s going to. Which is kind of a cynical thing to say but what it does is teach you a certain perspective. As you get older, and you’ve rattled around the industry a fair bit, you get what I call perspective. Things often, often, usually, almost always take longer and cost more than you think so you have to build realistic expectations. I’m skeptical when someone puts a business plan in front of me and says this product is going to be on the market by 2002 and it’s going to cost $10 million. I multiply the time by two and the amount of dollars by four and then I’m getting close.”

8. What achievement are you most proud of in your career?

“The thing that I was most proud of was in my previous job (as CEO of Apotex Fermentation). When I joined Apotex (1994) we had a product (Apo-Lovastatin, for cholesterol reduction) that was about to die. It was struggling (in research and development) and we just couldn’t get it to do the things we needed it to do. In the three years that I was there, we breathed life into this product and completed the research, started to manufacture it. Apotex had it registered, we successfully defended litigation and it became the biggest selling second-entry pharmaceutical in the country. It sells in the region of $100 million a year and I can claim a fairly goodly slice of the credit for it. That’s what everyone in our business wants to do.”

9. So what is the status of Phase III clinical trials for Synsorb’s lead product, Synsorb Cd?

“We’ve been in the trial since April 1 of 2000 and we expect to complete, all being well, by the end of 2002 which I know sounds like a long time. In pharmaceutical development terms, it’s like next week. Time-wise, we’re over a third of the way there. We don’t know anything about the trial except how many patients are in it because it’s what’s called double-blind placebo controlled. The patients don’t know if they’re getting the drug or the placebo. The doctors don’t know if the patients are getting the drug or the placebo. And the company certainly doesn’t know. What’s happening? We have no idea. We do know there are no safety issues at this point.”

10. Isn’t it perplexing when you don’t know what’s going on?

“You have to have this little serenity in your character to survive in this business. Clinical trials take years and you just have to be serene about that. What’s really difficult is when there is pressure on the stock price, as ours has been over the past nine months or so, and investors want reasons to hold on to the stock or reasons to buy the stock.”

11. So what can you do to appease investors?

“There isn’t much you can do. Our industry is driven by news. In the absence of sales and profits and things, the only thing that drives the valuation is news, but when you don’t have news because you’re in the quiet period of a clinical trial, it’s very frustrating not being able to communicate good stuff to the shareholders. But you can’t manufacture news. When we’ve got the clinical data, we’ve got the clinical data, and not before.”

12. Why has Synsorb decided to focus totally on the Cd product?

“We have other potential candidates (drugs), but the reason we’ve chosen to focus on Synsorb Cd is that we’re in a category of drugs that is quite novel and unique. This drug’s based on sugar chemistry, which is kind of untested. Synsorb Cd is not the only thing that’s on trial. It’s the whole notion of sugarless drugs. First of all, it’s very important to prove the utility of the concept. If Cd works, then we can light a fire under the other (products), knowing we would be less likely to be wasting shareholders’ money.”

13. So you need a lot of patience to invest in biotech?

“If you want to invest in biotech, buy and expect to hold for four years. Biotech stocks have been characterized as having a lot of speculators in them but they should not. It’s a stock for investors – patient investors.”

14. How do you reflect on your career?

“I did OK. I got some lucky breaks. I fast-tracked through my education. I got into the workforce early. I took lots of risks. And it has all worked out fairly nicely. I look back and think: ‘Can I complain about that?’ No, not at all, not at all.”

15. How do you spend your leisure time?

“For years and years, I’ve liked to keep in shape but I’ve got to tell you, it’s getting tougher to run and lift weights now that I’ve turned 50. So I’m ratcheting back on that a little. I still do five or six hours a week in my gym at home. I also like to go hiking with my wife (Angela).”

16. How do you see the biotech industry evolving?

“You haven’t seen nothing yet. This whole sequencing of the human genome has opened up such a Pandora’s Box of possibilities. So as we understand how diseases are caused at the molecular level and how they can be treated at a molecular level in a very precise way, it’ll open up such a huge category of pharmaceutical interventions.”

17. Do you aspire to work in the area of human genome?

“I have a feeling that I’ll be too old to work with these products because they’re probably about eight to 10 years away and I’m getting to a stage where I’ll be at the end of my career by that point.”

18. Do you have any other aspirations beyond Synsorb?

“I’ve always enjoyed public speaking and I’d like to do more of that. I can usually hold an audience quite well and I’m not at all afraid of public speaking. I wouldn’t mind doing that, not necessarily for money but just for the hell of it.”

19. What annoys you most about the world?

“I’m constantly disappointed by the ignorance of people. I don’t mean ignorance as in ill-educated. I mean rude, inconsiderate, selfish. I could get deep into the road-rage (issue). We live in a society here. You have to give, take, give a little space for others. Yet, the world — or at least the slice of the world I live in — seems to be filled with single-minded, self-centered people that are totally unresponsive to the needs of others. It’s gotten worse. I was told many, many years ago, when I took a management job, to develop a leathery back and it’s bloody right.”

20. Are you planning to retire early?

“I’d like to retire before I’m 60. When I was in England, I saw a very startling statistic on the working population of London. They found that if you retired at the age of 60, you would on average draw pension for 13 years. If you retired at 65, you would on average draw pension for 18 months. So those last five years of working take years off your life . . . So my goal has always been to retire before 60 because I don’t want to be pushing up daisies while I’m still in my 60s.”

IN PROFILE: David Cox

* Born/raised/age: Hull, England; 50.

* Title: CEO/president, Synsorb Biotech (since 1997).

* Education: B.Sc. (honours) in bacteriology and PhD in microbiology from Leeds University (England).

* Family: Wife Angela, children Laura, 17, Alex, 21, and James, 23.

* Resume: Prior to joining Synsorb, Cox was president and CEO of Apotex Fermentation (1994-97) and was with the Alberta Research Council from 1988-94 (head of biotechnology, vice-president of advanced technology).

* Claim to fame: While at Apotex, Cox led the company to a milestone in bringing a cholesterol-reducing drug, Apo-Lovastatin, to commercialization.

* Passions: Tinkering with his 1966 Mustang, hiking, sun-splashed beaches, public speaking.

THE COMPANY: Synsorb Biotech

* Brass: David Cox, CEO/president; Murray Ratcliffe, vice-president, research and development and manufacturing; Douglas Froom, vice-president, business development; Bill Hogg, vice-president, finance, chief financial officer.

* Profile: Synsorb is a pharmaceutical company that develops and manufactures novel, high-value, carbohydrate-based therapies.

* Lead product: Synsorb Cd is a potential treatment for recurrent C. Difficile Associated Diarrhea (CDAD), a condition most often triggered by antibiotic use. The drug has been granted fast-track status by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and is in Phase III (final phase) clinical testing across North America.

* Stat: Synsorb owns 6,750,000 shares of Oncolytics Biotech, a company developing Reolysin as a potential cancer therapeutic.

* Stock price (SYB-TSE): $1.50 (year range, $1.13-$5.40).

* Web site: www.synsorb.com

* Address: 410-1167 Kensington Cres. N.W., Calgary T2N 1X7.

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Gyle Konotopetz can be reached at: gyle@businessedge.ca