Tadataka “Tachi” Yamada. (Twitter Photo via @TachiYamada)

Tadataka Yamada, a pioneer in drug and vaccine development who helped forge numerous biotech companies and spent five years at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as head of global health, died Wednesday morning of natural causes at his home in Seattle. He was 76.

Endpoints News confirmed Yamada’s death with Seattle venture firm Frazier Healthcare Partners, where Yamada, known as “Tachi,” was a partner.

Yamada was born in Japan and attended boarding school in Andover, Mass., before studying at Stanford and earning an MD at NYU. While he was chair of medicine at the University of Michigan, he was recruited to the company that would become GlaxoSmithKline, rising to head of R&D. He was known there for streamlining drug development and doubling the number of compounds in GSK’s pipeline.

In 2000, GSK sued Nelson Mandela and the South African government over the pricing of HIV medicines, which “shocked and embarrassed” Yamada, spurring him to set up an arm of GSK focused on neglected diseases.

“I proposed to set up a laboratory that focused on malaria and TB, to make medicines without worrying about whether we make money or not,” he told the Journal of Clinical Investigation in a 2012 interview. The Gates Foundation funded much of that work.

Yamada led the Seattle-based Gates Foundation’s global health program from 2005 to 2011, overseeing $9 billion directed at addressing health challenges of the developing world.

Gates Foundation CEO Mark Suzman said in a tweet Thursday that Yamada’s “legacy of impact lives on at the foundation.”

Yamada left Gates to become chief medical and scientific officer and executive vice president of Tokyo-based Takeda Pharmaceuticals.

“When I left Japan at age 15 to come to the U.S., I made my father a promise that one day I’d come back to Japan,” Yamada told JCI. “I felt that what I learned at the foundation — about urgency, innovation, measuring, and partnering — these things would help the pharmaceutical industry. I actually believe that the pharmaceutical industry is the most important industry in the world.”

More recently, as a partner at Frazier, Yamada co-founded a series of companies, including Phathom Pharmaceuticals, Passage Bio, Scout Bio, and Outpost Medicine.

His involvement in Seattle companies included serving as chairman of the board at Athira Pharma, the Bothell, Wash.-based company that’s been embroiled in a recent controversy over image manipulation in scientific papers authored by its CEO. Yamada was also board chair of vaccine company Icosavax, a University of Washington spinout which he co-founded and which went public last week. Yamada also served as chair of the board of directors at the Clinton Health Access Initiative.

Remembrances and tributes poured in on Thursday morning.

  • “I’m deeply saddened to hear of Tachi’s passing. I loved working with him and I learned a lot from him. His passion for saving lives and making the world a fairer place was inspiring, and he matched it with an incredible intellect,” said Bill Gates in a tweet.
  • “Dr. Tachi Yamada was one of my first global health teachers,” Melinda French Gates said in a tweet. “Even when running large organizations, he never stopped thinking like a doctor responsible to each patient. He saw the infinite worth in every person and worked tirelessly to keep them all healthy.”
  • “Tachi was a brilliant man, a physician-scientist, and deeply committed to the cause of public health,” said Icosavax CEO Adam Simpson, said in a statement. “I will miss his friendship, his optimism and his dedication, losses that I know are mitigated in some part by the enormous legacy he leaves behind.”
  • “Dr. Tachi Yamada was an extraordinary scientist and leader who used his brilliant mind and kind, good heart to improve the lives of millions of people…We’ll miss him so much,” former President Bill Clinton said in a tweet.
  • “Tachi understood well the many challenges that early-stage biotechnology companies often face when developing disruptive technologies, and always reminded us to consider how the treatments we were developing would affect patients and (more broadly) global health,” said Thong Q. Le, CEO and senior managing director at Seattle-based Accelerator Life Science Partners, an investment firm where Yamada was senior advisor and board member.
  • “A wonderful man and a giant in biomedical research and global health. In the 1980s we were in adjacent labs at the University of Michigan” said Francis Collins, director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health. “I will miss my friend greatly.”
  • “An amazing individual who made an immense contribution to global health & the lives of so many people around the world. You will be hugely missed, my friend,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization.
  • “He was a special person who did things to help people. That was his North Star,” his son Takao told the Timmerman Report.

Gates Foundation CEO Mark Suzman expanded on what he tweeted, above, in a statement:

  • “[Yamada] led the Global Health Program during a critical period in the foundation’s development and took the work to new levels of sophistication. He was especially devoted to measuring impact, famously quoting a former boss that ‘If you’re not keeping score, you’re just practicing.’ As a leader, he earned the respect of colleagues and partners by showing them respect. He refused to carry a phone because he wanted to pay full attention to everyone he met. He was deeply committed to the foundation’s mission. One of his proudest moments was when he administered one of the first doses of a new meningitis vaccine his team had helped develop at a price African countries could afford. We are devastated to lose Tachi, but his legacy will live on in the future accomplishments of the foundation he helped to build and the many talented people he mentored over his 50-year career.”

Frazier Healthcare Partners provided its remembrance in the following statement to GeekWire:

  • “Some of our favorite memories of Tachi are traveling with him to Japan. He would always get up at 5 a.m., despite the 8-hour time change, to get on the treadmill prior to joining us at breakfast. He insisted on taking us out to the local markets for Japanese street food and on building in a couple of hours for shopping at Uniqlo for T-shirts and boxers. He was relentless in his energy, and we all did our best to keep up with him.” … “He was a joy to brainstorm ideas, to challenge us to do better and to explore new areas such as embracing vaccine development,’ said the firm’s founder and chair Alan Frazier, in an email. … “Tachi, first and foremost, was a kind, thoughtful, brilliant man who had real purpose,” added Nader Naini, a managing partner at Frazier. “Besides all of his tremendous accomplishments professionally, which are too many to mention, he raised beautiful children and left behind an incredibly supportive wife which allowed him to achieve so much. Both personally and professionally, I will miss him.”
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