Growing up in the Jim Crow South of Alabama, Black folks surrounded him, but Dr. Ted Love had never met anyone with Sickle Cell Disease. He met his first SCD patients in medical school at a hospital in New Haven. “These patients would come in and get terrible care. Even though this was one of the most world-renowned hospitals. I was shocked that there was so much bias against them. People thought they were there to get narcotics,” Loves says of SCD patients experiencing a painful crisis seeking medication. “And it was a dramatic contrast to patients with CF (cystic fibrosis). Who also died very quickly, often in their 20s back then. But those patients had a special part of the hospital. They had special staff who knew them by their first names. And it was a dramatic contrast to the sickle cell patient experience.”
Dr. Love did his residency at Harvard and worked at Mass General Hospital. Although that hospital didn’t see as many SCD patients, he was dismayed to witness a similar scenario. He filed these encounters in the back of his mind. “I ended up in biotech and focused my career on cardiovascular disease and cancer,” Dr. Love says. “And I almost felt guilty for not doing anything about the inequity I saw.”
Dr. Love retired and moved to the wine country in 2012 and got a call from a former Harvard professor, Charles Homcy, who was starting a sickle cell company, Global Blood Therapies, GBT. He tried to coax Dr. Love out of retirement to join the venture-funded company. Initially, the new retiree only agreed to join the board of directors. But a year into the project, he called his wife after reviewing some new material and told her he needed to talk to her about it. “When I got home, my wife and three daughters said, ‘We know you, we know how passionate you are, how you care about the situation sickle cell patients face. And we support you doing this.’ So I called the company back and said, if you want me to be the CEO, I have the support to do it.” I started that role in 2014.”
One of Dr. Love’s first things on his agenda was to connect with the SCD community. “I realized if we were serious about the commitment to these patients, we would have to build those deep relationships early,” Dr. Love explains. “We talked to groups about the clinical trial. Will you help get it done? They told us what data they wanted us to share, and we delivered on that commitment.” That partnership resulted in our drug, Oxbryta, which helps keep hemoglobin from clumping together. After receiving accelerated approval in 2019, the FDA granted breakthrough approval in 2021. Pfizer acquired GBT for $5.4 billion in 2022.
Dr. Love says that GBT was the world’s largest investor in solutions for SCD. Outspending the US government. “The other thing I’m super proud of is that we have stimulated interest and innovations for SCD, as it has been done for cystic fibrosis.”
You already know that Dr. Love doesn’t know the meaning of retirement. He is taking part in the Sickle Cell Forward Trip this fall. “I am trying to get 20 people to donate $50,000 each, and we are going to hike Kilimanjaro in September,” Dr. Love says.”We will give that money to a clinic in Africa where patients often die before their fifth birthday because they don’t have access to simple things, and we will make those things available. A matching gift will go toward sickle cell treatment in the US. We are building a culture to become what we need to see.” (But you can also donate as little as $5 to the cause.)
If you are thinking about what you can do that doesn’t cost you anything, Dr. Love suggests putting some pressure on your representatives and senators. One thing on his list is resurrecting the Sickle Cell Treatment Act, which would allocate $535 million annually to fund SCD Centers of Excellence and CBOs.
However, Dr. Love is hopeful about the innovation happening at Pfizer and across the industry. “I’m hoping to improve the quality and quantity of their medicine in the next decade. To make a big difference in managing sickle cell with two or three pills, and patients live longer in the future.”
