Tom Reiner serves as the Chief Scientific Officer at Evergreen Theragnostics. He is the former Radioligand Therapy (RLT) Lead at the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research (NIBR) and a former member of the NIBR Oncology Leadership Team. Dr. Reiner also served as Head of RLT Drug Discovery on the AAA/Novartis Executive Leadership Team. During his academic career, he was an Assistant/Associate Member and Laboratory Head at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. During this same period, he also held affiliations as an Assistant/Associate Professor at Gerstner Sloan Kettering Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences and as Associate Professor at Weill Cornell Medical College. He was also a Member of the Sloan Kettering Institute Chemical Biology Program from 2018 to 2021. He is the recipient of the 2020 WMIS Roger Tsien Award for Excellence in Chemical Biology. From 2011 to 2012, Thomas served as an Instructor at Harvard Medical School/Massachusetts General Hospital, and previously as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Systems Biology at Massachusetts General Hospital from 2009 to 2011. Thomas received his Ph.D. from the Technical University of Munich, Germany, where he trained as a synthetic chemist.
Could you tell me a little bit about your background and describe your journey to becoming a leader in the radiopharma industry?
I did my PhD from 2002-2007 at the Technical University of Munich in Germany, with stints at the University of Oxford in IIT Bombay (now IIT Mumbai) and then did a postdoc at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, which is MIT Harvard Medical School teaching hospital. Then I became a junior faculty for about nine months. I then moved from that position to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where I was an Assistant Professor and then Associate Professor at Sloan Kettering School of Biomedical Sciences, and Cornell Weill Cornell Medical College and the Sloan Kettering Institute.
At that point someone at Novartis reached out to me because Novartis had just bought AAA, the radiopharmaceutical company, and we had just been translating radiopharmaceutical drugs into the clinic. And so somebody reached out to ask if I’d like to be the Head of Drug Development at AAA with a second affiliation being the Executive Director at the Novartis Institute for Biomedical Research. So we then moved from New York to Basel, Switzerland and about 2 years later I then accepted my current position as CSO at Evergreen Theragnostics.
Can you give me a brief overview of Evergreen Theragnostics. What do you believe sets Evergreen’s approach apart in the radiopharma sector?
In my mind, Evergreen Theragnositcs is the most dynamic and fastest growing small company there is, because we have these three separate pillars: CDMO, products, and discovery. For the CDMO pillar, we have a manufacturing site in Springfield, New Jersey where we make radiopharmaceuticals for our customers who run clinical trials. So that involves manufacturing, GMP, quality control, quality assurance – essentially a full scale factory for radiopharmaceuticals.
Our second pillar involves our clinically diverse products. We are currently looking forward to the FDA approval of our first medicine – it’s an imaging agent, label of Gallium 68, that is called OCTEVY™. So, Octevy is going to be the first hopefully of many drugs that Evergreen markets. So that will be a big milestone for us.
The third pillar is the discovery and development of novel radiopharmaceuticals. Which is where I fit in as CSO; my team and I are working to build a pipeline for really unprecedented, difficult to treat targets. They’re intended to be the next generation of Pluvicto and Lutathera. So that’s what we’re looking forward to. We really want to increase the options for cancer patients. And all three of our pillars within Evergreen are working towards that goal.
Also as mentioned, I’ve worked at Novartis and before that I was at MSKCC. I was at Novartis during the time that Pluvicto came out and James Cook, our CEO, was the head of the US operations for AAA when AAA was developing Lutathera. James also worked on their first imaging agent, Netspot. So there’s a lot of aggregated expertise here at Evergreen and we really hope that we can capitalize on that.
Looking towards the future, what prospects or goals is Evergreen working towards? Can you share some upcoming projects or areas of focus?
We are going after the most severe and untreatable diseases. So one of our projects is focused on glioblastoma, which famously has a median survival rate of just about 14 months. The reason I think this is so important is because there’s really no hope for those patients. And the current standard of care is radiating a quadrant of the brain with external beam radiotherapy, which has huge side effects. So even if we aren’t able to increase the survival rate, we can at least hopefully be more targeted in treatment to reduce side effects and give the patients a better quality of life.
Pancreatic cancer, glioblastoma, many cancers that affect adolescents; these are the diseases where patients have no hope of survival under current standards of care. So here is where we think we can provide that hope. Another example would be de-differentiated multi-metastatic disease. I think surgeons can’t really do anything because you can only remove so many metastases, and external beam radiotherapy would be an issue too because the patient can only handle so much radiation. So providing targeted radiation via radiopharmaceuticals might make a big difference for these patients. And we’ve seen that with prostate cancer, where patients who had upwards of 50 metastases then ended up with none after two courses of treatment. That’s almost a miracle cure. At the end of the day it’s science, but it’s really impressive.
I really hope that we will find the next Pluvicto. Even if it’s not us, I hope that there is one company, out of all those radiopharma companies being founded, that finds the next big blockbuster. Because if there’s no big blockbuster, then radioligand therapy is going to remain a one trick pony and we really don’t want that. The technology is very multifaceted and my hope is that 10 years from now, it’ll be something that is as well known or as natural to drug development as antibody drug conjugates.
I’ve read that manufacturing and supply chain management can be complex in the radiopharma sector due to radioisotope half-life. What strategies does Evergreen employ to address these challenges and ensure a stable supply?
I would actually like to challenge that take. The supply chain just needs to be made resilient, so that if one segment drops out, there’s another one that can take over. And the best example for that is tuna fish. Tokyo has these very famous fish markets, and in the morning you can see these giant tuna fish being auctioned off that had just come in from the sea. And two days later you can be eating that fish in your sushi on Columbus Circle in New York City. That works because of a very resilient supply chain and redundancy within that supply chain. I mean lutetium 177 has a half life of seven days, but that tuna fish has much less than that. So if it works for sushi grade tuna, then I have high hopes for radiopharmaceuticals.
How does Evergreen see its role within the broader landscape of the biotech industry? What impact do you hope to make?
So our CDMO side of the business is there to serve our customers, our diverse clinical products business is there to provide additional options to patients, and the discovery side is really to find some new medicines for previously untreatable diseases. And I mean if we succeed, that would speak for itself. So essentially it’s not our goal to create something that is useful for people on a day-to-day basis, it’s not all about the bottom line for us. And I know it’s not really the traditional startup mentality that many startups have, but we want to be old school, you know, like the 70s in that way, and really do something and make something and have a site where people work in a lab rather than at a computer.
