Tammie Wahaus built a career as a CPA, which prepared her for becoming an entrepreneur and launching Olathe-based medical biotech company Elias Animal Health.
“What was most fascinating to me was the opportunity to get in and understand how businesses make money, how they manage their capital resources and how they bring products to market, which I think is what gave me a good foundation for entrepreneurship,” Wahaus said of being a CPA. “One of the greatest things you learn in public accounting is the skill of getting into new and disparate businesses and understanding their industry very quickly.”
That skill set paid off when she joined TVAX Biomedical Inc. as CFO in 2012. The human health company was working on a cancer therapeutic, and Wahaus saw how it could be applied to dogs. Every year, 6 million dogs are diagnosed with cancer, she said. That statistic spurred her to spin out Elias Animal Health from TVAX in 2014. Elias is focused on advancing its novel targeted T-cell immunotherapy treatment for canine cancers, which currently is available on a limited basis to veterinarians.
What gave you the courage to spin out the company and become an entrepreneur?
I guess I’m a little bit of a risk-taker. My goal in life is to make a difference, and I saw this as an opportunity to really advance the treatment options both from a safety and efficacy perspective for companion animals and humans. … It’s a significant problem and worthy of the effort.
How can Elias help advance cancer treatment in humans?
Dogs are an extremely good model for understanding how a cancer therapeutic would behave in humans. Canine cancers are very similar to human cancers, so what we learn in the companion animal space, particularly in dogs, will be able to be studied to determine how best to advance this therapeutic in humans.
What makes your treatment different than how cancer traditionally has been treated in the past?
The Elias immunotherapy is a biologic that is a combination of a cancer vaccine plus activated T-cell therapy. The activated T-cell therapy is a significant differentiator in that what we are doing is teaching the immune system to not only recognize the cancer, but to mount an immune response. Traditionally, the chemo therapeutics are not as targeted. …
(Targeted therapies) can lead to more effective treatment and can also result in a safer treatment option. The targeted therapies are aimed at killing cancer cells,, whereas non-targeted therapies are aimed at killing rapidly dividing cells, which means you’re not only going to get the cancer cells, but you’re also going to get normal cells.
How would you describe the progress Elias has made?
The progress we’ve made so far is extremely exciting. … There have been very few products approved in the past 40 years, so to be sitting where we are today and being viewed as a leader in the veterinary oncology space is exciting.
What’s a recent win?
As part of the product approval process, we conducted a large randomized clinical trial in osteosarcoma that we had to launch at the beginning of the pandemic. It was a difficult decision. The world was shutting down and we were ready to launch a major clinical trial. We took about 30 days to examine how best to continue to move the company forward in the environment of a pandemic, where veterinary hospitals were having to change all of their protocols for seeing patients. Like us, they had to organize their employees around risk mitigation strategies. …
We made the decision that we would launch the clinical trial in a non-traditional way by opening clinical trial sites when they were ready to open. … We had identified 10 hospitals to participate in the trial. … We actually exceeded our expectations for enrollment — 100 dogs enrolled in less than a year.
What was it like navigating the trial during the pandemic?
You just had to be alert to what was happening in the hospitals and what was happening in your own community. You had to be quick to respond and be prepared to address whatever surprise was coming. In entrepreneurship, it’s kind of a bob-and-weave world, and the pandemic was no different.
What are your plans moving forward?
We have now opened our next clinical trial focused on oral malignant melanoma. We have plans for additional trials in other cancer types and we are looking to expand our pipeline to include other cancer immunotherapies that can work in combination with the Elias cancer immunotherapy.
The future of cancer therapy will involve combinations of treatment, so we are looking to expand our portfolio to include additional novel products that can increase efficacy and increase the number of dogs that respond to the treatment. We had a high response rate compared to traditional chemotherapy, and we want even more.
What’s fulfilling about your job?
One of my guiding principles is to always leave it better than you found it, and the results in our preliminary clinical trials were extremely impressive, with a significant number of patients becoming long-term survivors. And that makes it all worthwhile.
