How One Aggie Is Transforming Cancer Treatment

Humble Beginnings in Gladewater

It’s a long way to the booming biotech scene of San Diego from the rural East Texas oil bust town of Gladewater, population 6,272. Hood had a hardscrabble upbringing; his family fell among the 80% in his school district below the poverty line. He and his three brothers worked multiple jobs to help their father, a hospital maintenance worker, and mother make ends meet for themselves and the occasional relatives or family friends down on their luck who stayed with them in their 1,500-square-foot house. “I learned to work very hard, which is the most important skill for success,” he said.

The family ran the local water system, which required lots of backbreaking shoveling. The boys helped tend their half-acre garden and shucked endless black-eyed peas with kin, which made Hood comfortable socializing with others for hours. They bailed and hauled hay commercially during 16-hour summer workdays. And they ran a few hundred heads of cattle and handled the accompanying vaccinations, castrations and births.  

Witnessing the rhythms of life sparked Hood’s interest in biology and prepared him in some unexpected ways for his later career. “There is nothing like facing down a 1,500-pound Brahman bull that really doesn’t want to get in the trailer to teach you to live in the moment and be fearless,” Hood said. “There is nothing a venture capitalist investor could ever do to compare.”

Transformative Experiences at Texas A&M

Texas A&M felt like an entirely different world for Hood when he arrived as a first-generation student in fall 1985. A combination of Pell grants, work study and scholarships made his bachelor’s degree in biochemistry possible, support he never took for granted. “I knew I was blessed to be there,” he said. “Despite being huge, the school embraced kids like me, and the instructors were supportive even in very large classes.”

Hood was in awe of the diversity of viewpoints, opportunities and clubs he found on campus. “I treated the clubs like tapas,” he said. “I did a little sampling of everything.” He played on the club rugby team, tried ultimate frisbee, and checked out the Objectivist Society and numerous other clubs to satisfy his curiosity. He played frequent pick-up basketball games in the old G. Rollie White Coliseum. He formed a de facto family with the guys in his ramp in Hart Hall, many of whom remain close friends to this day. And he appreciated campus traditions such as Silver Taps, Muster and standing for football games. “It all has a common theme of unity and working toward things bigger than you,” he said.

Hood worked hard throughout his time on campus. His first job was slinging and delivering pizzas for DoubleDave’s Pizzaworks. He particularly enjoyed his shifts at the lively Northgate location, where he’d deliver eight to 10 pizzas at a time by bike to the dorms across the street. When behind the counter, he and a coworker tried to impress girls by slinging pizzas with pizzazz. “We’d both spin our pizzas in the air and catch the other guy’s dough, then just flip it back and forth,” he laughed.

He later spent two years of work study under Dr. Carlos Gonzalez, a professor of plant pathology and microbiology in Texas A&M AgriLife Research and founding director of the university’s Center for Phage Technology. Gonzalez became an influential mentor and instructor not just in class but also in life. “He’s a very genuine, empathetic and scientifically curious person,” Hood said. “He instilled the notion of being open to where the data takes you in how to solve a problem. Embrace the problem with enthusiasm, dedication and an obsession to solve it.”
 

Collaboration, Curiosity, Criteria and Communication 

Hood has spent his career in the San Diego area, the third largest biotech hub in the world. He greatly appreciates the climate, not only in terms of weather (“Before I moved here, I didn’t realize you could live without mosquitos,” he quipped) but also the exceptionally collaborative nature of the burgeoning biotech scene. “We all help each other out,” he said.  

That help is critical in the long-odds world of drug development. Less than 5% of drugs that enter clinical trial make it to market. Even more fail before getting to clinical trial. It costs roughly $7 billion for each approval, a cost that doubles about every nine years.  

A successful drug candidate has to get a lot of crucial criteria right all at the same time. First, Hood explained, you have to understand enough about a disease to pick the right genetic target for your drug. The drug can’t have significant side effects, most of which are unpredictable until you test it in patients. The drug has to have good pharmacokinetics, meaning the patient can take the drug easily, the drug goes to the site of the disease to act on the target and stays at that site long enough to benefit the patient. And you have to do all of that in a way that is commercially feasible. “These criteria are often in conflict with each other,” Hood said.  

But when everything works just right in one molecule—touchdown. 

To declare victory, though, requires an astute combination of not just scientific prowess but also business acumen. Hood credits his success in launching three biotech startups, in part, to the example set at Texas A&M by Gonzalez: Be curious. “I’m curious enough to connect dots that other people may not look at to identify disease drivers, identify great people to help me push the programs forward and identify ways to communicate this to third parties,” he said.  

He shares with his longtime team members a like-minded altruistic motivation by the potential of a new drug to improve and save lives. He focuses on drugs for diseases in which the root cause can be targeted and for which there’s no other effective treatment. “That’s where you maximize benefit to patients,” he said.  

To express those benefits to potential investors, Hood draws inspiration from one of his heroes, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman. “He famously said that if you really understand something, you should be able to teach it to a fifth grader,” Hood said. And so he distills his pitches down to what he calls actionable truth. “This is what the drug is. This is the problem no one else can solve. And this is how we are going to solve it,” he explained.  

“It Was Obviously the Right Thing To Do.” 

Hood’s greatest victory so far is the drug fedratinib. It’s used to treat patients with a rare bone marrow cancer called myelofibrosis, which is caused by a mutation in a single protein known as JAK2. The mutant protein accelerates the production of blood cells, which migrate to organs, such as the spleen, and cause significant enlargement. For many patients, fedratinib blocks JAK2, restores normal blood cell production and reduces symptoms of the disease.  

Hood’s “touchdown moment” on fedratinib occurred in 2006, while he was the director of research for TargeGen. By 2013, more than 700 patients had completed a Phase III clinical trial and showed tremendous improvement. “Your spleen is supposed to be the size of a fist. With myelofibrosis, it becomes the size of a basketball,” Hood explained. “With treatment, the spleen shrank back to normal size. That meant the drug worked and it was safe. That’s a dream come true right there. You’re reversing the disease in patients.”  
 

In 2010, TargeGen sold the drug to the French pharmaceutical firm Sanofi, which would complete the remaining steps to earn regulatory approval and take it to market. Hood turned his attention to his new biotech startup, Samumed, and new projects.   

But in late 2013, the fedratinib “game” unexpectedly entered overtime. Sanofi suddenly halted development of the drug due to unusual neurological symptoms in seven out of 500 patients; the FDA put a hold on trials pending further review. “Physicians and patients involved in the trial reached out to me to see if I could get access to the drug, because otherwise they wouldn’t survive,” he said.  

Hood knew the drug better than anyone else; he believed he was the only person who could get it approved. He came to Sally with a “Hail Mary” plan: He’d quit his current job. With $250,000 of their own money, he’d create a new company, Impact Biomedicines, that would license the drug back from Sanofi. He’d need to solicit $5 million in additional funding within 90 days to satisfy initial investors or lose their own money.  

Sally’s response? “It all goes back to her high integrity,” he said. “She said, ‘Yes, do it. It’s the right thing.’ The two of us can talk for hours about an Aggie football game. But that conversation took probably five minutes, because we felt it was obviously the right thing to do.” 

After 35 “no” responses, Hood secured the funding he needed in time. He then crusaded for 17 months to prove the drug’s safety. The FDA lifted its hold in August 2017. He negotiated a “compassionate use” exemption for patients who’d gotten better on the drug. The reprieve came too late for some but was a salvation for patients like Sandra, one of the original Phase I trial participants in San Diego. Her disease had advanced during the FDA hold; she had a prognosis of only six to 12 months to live. “Within six months of restarting fedratinib, she was on a tropical honeymoon,” Hood said. “She is still alive and thriving today.”  

Pharmaceutical firm Celgene purchased Impact Biomedicines and the rights to fedratinib in January 2018 in a deal worth up to $7 billion. “They were positioned to maximize patient access in a way we never could if we kept the drug,” Hood explained. Elated, Hood and his team celebrated with a party featuring the band the Gin Blossoms that raised around $600,000 for the Myelofibrosis Society.   

The FDA gave final regulatory approval for the drug in August 2019, followed by the European Commission in February 2021. The drug is now the first-line treatment for myelofibrosis patients worldwide. “In biotech, if you succeed, people live and thrive who otherwise would suffer or die,” he said. “Getting all of the pieces of the puzzle to line up so patients live longer and feel better is the big payoff.”