“Currently, only one out of every 10,000 promising new drugs are approved for clinical use, and treatments typically take 14 years and an investment of $1.2 billion before they are made available to patients who desperately need them,” said Ms. Solomon. “In part, this is because under the current system drugs are first tested in animals, which often react differently to drugs than humans. We can accelerate and de-risk the drug discovery process by first testing promising drugs for safety and effectiveness on human cells and tissues grown from stem cells in a laboratory dish. This will revolutionize drug development and move critical new treatments to patients faster.”
Fast-tracking cures and therapeutic treatments for some of the world’s most devastating diseases is the highest priority of NYSCF and its co-founder Ms. Solomon, whose son has type 1 diabetes. Founded in 2005, NYSCF now employs 40-full-time researchers concentrating on diseases where stem cell therapy shows the most promise: diabetes, heart disease, cancer, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) and bone regeneration. At the NYSCF Drug Discovery Center, which is part of the foundation’s state of the art stem cell research laboratory, researchers are creating a new paradigm for translational research using stem cell technology to make new drugs safer and more effective while minimizing side effects.
As she tells it, there are two sayings taped above Susan Solomon’s desk—one by Ghandi, which she can’t immediately recall, the other a bit of folklore, which she can. “When you’re up to your ass in alligators, it’s hard to remember that you’re original intention is to drain the swamp.” Seven years after she co-founded the New York Stem Cell Foundation, and only six since she opened its first laboratory, Solomon has transformed her organization into a global leader in stem cell research through sheer force of will. This past December, Time Magazine declared NYSCF’s work on somatic cell nuclear transfer—the same process used to help clone Dolly the sheep—the number one medical breakthrough of the year. The hope, explained Daniel Paull, a 26-year-old researcher with a mad scientist’s shock of hair, is that the process will yield stem cells that can be used to treat diseases like diabetes and Alzheimer’s. “We’ve done a lot,” he said at NYSCF’s laboratory in New York City, whose location the foundation has asked to keep confidential for security purposes. “It’s been a good year.”
Before Paull first donned a lab coat, before he was even born, Solomon was a single mother at Rutgers Law School. Her path to becoming the chief executive officer at NYSCF was circuitous. After a brief stint at the corporate law firm Debevoise & Plimpton, she ran or helped run a host of enterprises that ran the gamut from Sotheby’s online to Sony Worldwide Networks, one of the first Internet broadcast providers. Between new media gigs, she cut her teeth in financing working for venture capitalists like Ron Perelman, Alan Patricof and Stephen Swid. While her resume may appear random or convoluted, what emerges is a portrait of a distinctly American entrepreneur—one whose greatest chapter is still being written.
The NYSCF lab features more than 30 scientists from multiple countries and continents, its work stations demarcated by stylish, three-dimensional signs—a gift from the architect David Rockwell (Paul Goldberger, Solomon’s husband, is the architecture critic for The New Yorker). In a hallway adorned with neon-colored photographs of blastocysts, she spoke with Flatt about starting her own foundation, the unlikely intersection of art and science and the future of stem cell research.
JACOB SUGARMAN: You’ve worn a lot of different hats over the course of your career.
SUSAN SOLOMON: I was the original serial careerist—now you’re supposed to do that. I just got bored. I was constantly asking myself ‘what’s next?’ and ‘what’s new?’ and ‘what’s the new, disruptive technology?’ Maybe that’s last year’s phrase, but back then that’s all it was about for me.
JACOB SUGARMAN: How did you get involved in stem cell research?
SUSAN SOLOMON: My son, Ben, has Type-1 diabetes. On an emotional level, if something happens to one of your kids, you’ll just do anything to help them. Originally, I got involved in the advocacy organizations to raise money. I think it gave me an opportunity to understand how research was supported and why it takes so long to get translated. I understood how people thought in a very traditional way from my law background and I’d had the luck and privilege to learn from some of the best entrepreneurial thinkers. Working for people like Ron Perelman and Stephen Swid was on-the-ground business school. I came to understand that the most complex things could be broken down into understandable, comprehensible modules. And if you have a very difficult problem, you should not assume that somebody else is coming up with the solution.
JACOB SUGARMAN: But it’s one thing to take an interest in the subject, and quite another to start your own foundation.
SUSAN SOLOMON: By 2004, my mom had developed lung cancer. I had tried to do some consulting work, but she was really my priority for the year. I wanted to walk that walk with her and I’m so glad I did. Around that time, I was reading about this stem cell initiative in California and I thought ‘what are we doing here?’ Stem cell research was clearly the paradigm shift that we needed, but I wanted to know what was really going on. So I started talking to people at the disease advocacy organizations. Then I got a call from Harold Varmus, who had been head of the National Institutes of Health for the Clintons. He said that he had people in Washington who were willing to speak up in support of this research, but they needed to know that they had an advocacy committee. Together, we said ‘let’s see if we can get something going in this state.’ I wasn’t a scientist, but I’d been on non-profit boards and I knew what had to happen. I said to myself ‘it couldn’t be that hard.’
JACOB SUGARMAN: What were some of the challenges you faced getting started?
SUSAN SOLOMON: I had no money and I was running the foundation out of my apartment. I think it was in July of ‘06 that my husband Paul got up one morning to find that one of my staffers—I had six or eight people working in the apartment at the time—had decided to use her key to come in early. They kind of met as he was in his drawers picking up the paper, and he said to me ‘you have to get an office.’ Later, I got an email from our conference planner that said ‘meeting location: the kitchen.’ At that point, I realized this was getting old. We took a lease on a tiny bit of space on 68th and Broadway in the building across the street from the movie theater, and NYSCF grew from there.
JACOB SUGARMAN: When did you decide you needed a laboratory of your own?
SUSAN SOLOMON: At Harvard, I sat with Doug Melton and Kevin Eggan, who’s one of our chief advisors. He said that there was an experiment they wanted to do in diabetes research that required the collaboration of a clinic at Columbia, but the people who ran it were worried that the university could lose its federal funding. These were real concerns, not paranoid fantasies. That work was halted, and I thought, ‘my God, that’s such an important experiment. How could that not go forward?’ Kevin felt they needed a lab and I said, ‘why don’t we build one for ourselves?’ Apparently after I left, they said, ‘Well that’s not going to happen.’ Not knowing that, I did some research into existing lab space we could lease. We had to check that the building was not built with federal funds. I wanted to put the little money that we had into work, not building infrastructure, so we opened this in March ’06.
JACOB SUGARMAN: At what point did you feel that the New York Stem Cell Foundation had arrived?
SUSAN SOLOMON: Our first conference in October of ’06; it was an opportunity to bang a drum loudly and declare that we’re here, this field is real, and that we need to celebrate people who are doing outstanding work.
JACOB SUGARMAN: You’ve managed to secure an enormous amount of support from the artistic community.
SUSAN SOLOMON: They come from my and Paul’s worlds. I think there’s a natural crossover between art and science. Chuck Close, who’s been with us since the beginning, once said that science couldn’t depend on the government, which is why the most exciting work is privately supported. My parents were musicians. My mother was a pianist and my father founded Vanguard Records, so I grew up in a creative environment. We didn’t use the word entrepreneurial then, but my father was in business for himself with his brother. I guess NYSCF is how I expressive myself creatively. This is my music.
JACOB SUGARMAN: Given your academic background, did you ever feel that you were speaking a different language than the scientists around you?
SUSAN SOLOMON: I’ve gotten a daily lesson in developmental biology and biochemistry. When something’s immediately relevant to you and it isn’t just abstract information, you learn it. I’m not going to plate the cells, but now I know enough to understand what everybody is saying. I really believe that if you’re smart, and you ask enough questions, you can figure things out. And I think the smarter the people you’re asking are, the clearer they can explain things to you. I’d never set up a lab before, but I went into those of the top people around and asked ‘How big is this? What does it cost? Does it need special air? What is this piece of equipment? How many of those do you need?’ When you have really smart people, they attract other really smart people, and things just got hotter and hotter.
JACOB SUGARMAN: Stem cell research always been highly politicized, but especially so during an election cycle. What do you think the fervor around it says about America’s view towards science and medicine?
SUSAN SOLOMON: The problem is that this is not high concept stuff even though people seem to think it is. Testing drugs on the actual cells that get sick with a disease, that’s pretty simple. It’s unfortunate that they’re called embryonic stem cells, as opposed to pluripotent stem cells—meaning that they can turn into anything. People think of embryos, and if they think of embryos, they think of babies. Now all of a sudden they’re thinking about abortions. There are those people who feel it’s OK to compensate women for their time and burden if they donate eggs that are used to help a couple become pregnant, but not OK if they’re used for stem cell research. It’s nuts. You should hear Santorum.
JACOB SUGARMAN: I guess it’s not a surprise that he and Romney have come out against spending federal money on stem cell research.
SUSAN SOLOMON: Every single Republican candidate has come out against us, and all of them have said they would repeal the President’s executive order that opened the door slightly [for funding].
When we started doing public outreach panels at the 92nd Street Y, we tried to address the politics of stem cell research. After two years, I realized that we’re not going to change people’s minds. Maybe when they have to choose between a stem cell treatment for themselves or somebody that they love, they’ll feel differently. Or maybe they won’t—they’ll be like those people who reject blood transfusions. We just can’t spend any more time on that. There’s this big gap, and we’ve decided to live in that gap.
JACOB SUGARMAN: I imagine it can be exhausting. Now that you’ve gotten the foundation off the ground, do you ever think about retirement?
SUSAN SOLOMON: The problem is that this is not high concept stuff even though people seem to think it is. Testing drugs on the actual cells that get sick with a disease, that’s pretty simple. It’s unfortunate that they’re called embryonic stem cells, as opposed to pluripotent stem cells—meaning that they can turn into anything. People think of embryos, and if they think of embryos, they think of babies. Now all of a sudden they’re thinking about abortions. There are those people who feel it’s OK to compensate women for their time and burden if they donate eggs that are used to help a couple become pregnant, but not OK if they’re used for stem cell research. It’s nuts. You should hear Santorum.
JACOB SUGARMAN: I guess it’s not a surprise that he and Romney have come out against spending federal money on stem cell research.
SUSAN SOLOMON: Every single Republican candidate has come out against us, and all of them have said they would repeal the President’s executive order that opened the door slightly [for funding].
When we started doing public outreach panels at the 92nd Street Y, we tried to address the politics of stem cell research. After two years, I realized that we’re not going to change people’s minds. Maybe when they have to choose between a stem cell treatment for themselves or somebody that they love, they’ll feel differently. Or maybe they won’t—they’ll be like those people who reject blood transfusions. We just can’t spend any more time on that. There’s this big gap, and we’ve decided to live in that gap.
JACOB SUGARMAN: I imagine it can be exhausting. Now that you’ve gotten the foundation off the ground, do you ever think about retirement?
SUSAN SOLOMON: When I’m really tired. But then I go on vacation, and the emails start pouring in. I don’t see retirement as a relevant concept. I think people should continue to do interesting things as long as they’re excited about them and can make a real contribution. I like to do the “abducted-by-aliens” test. If we weren’t here, would it a make difference to you? If the answer is ever is no, then I will look seriously at discontinuing the foundation. But that’s simply not the case.
I see the first five years of NYSCF as having created the infrastructure. Now we get to see if we can take out a disease like diabetes. Then comes the autoimmune challenge. If you’re lucky enough to have a full and healthy life, you encounter conditions and diseases that you care about. Alzheimer’s is certainly on everyone’s mind. I think that we’re not quite there, but we’re close to it being an engineering problem.
JACOB SUGARMAN: How many years away are we from cures for these kinds of diseases?
SUSAN SOLOMON: If we had way more money, could hire more people, move to a space we actually fit into, and do experiments in parallel rather than in sequence, then we could shorten the time by half. But there is some work that simply takes years.
JACOB SUGARMAN: What’s next for NYSCF? What kinds of projects is the foundation working on now?
SUSAN SOLOMON: We’ve laid the groundwork for cell replacement therapy, so it’s just a question of perfecting it and making it more robust. We’ve also created an entire automated system—the first in the world that will allow us to make enough stem cell lines to create a genetic array. Basically, we’re providing the biology that’s been missing from the human genome project. If you have a stem cell line that represents entire populations, it should completely revolutionize drug development in this country. It will enable pharmaceutical companies to test their new drugs on all genetic types. I believe that in my lifetime, we’re going to have serious cures and better treatments.
Jacob Sugarman, a graduate of the Arthur L. Carter Institute of Journalism, is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn.
Amy Myers drawings are included in the permanent collections of the Guggenheim NYC, MFA Houston TX, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, California State University Museum, Greenville County Museum of Art among a dozen others. She has had solo exhibitions at Mary Boone Gallery, Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Suzanne Vielmetter LA Projects, Mike Weiss Gallery, Danese Gallery, Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, Dunn and Brown Contemporary, Pomona College Museum, Atlanta Center for Contemporary Art, Show Off, Paris.
> She has been awarded the Pollock-Krasner, the Matie Walsh Sharpe Studio grant and visiting artist at the American Academy of Rome