BY SAM PESHEK sam.peshek@theeagle.com
12-24-14
http://www.theeagle.com/news/local/aggie-grad-happy-to-put-off-retiring-to-advance-stem/article_2acceda7-cab1-59ad-9c2a-5c38efa94abe.html
David Eller could have retired a long time ago.
At the age of 76, he could spend his days on permanent vacation fly-fishing in Idaho, golfing in San Antonio or skiing on the Italian-Austrian border like he has done to get away from work for many years.
He isn't working because he is desperate for money and accolades. He's had those for many years.
During the '80s, Eller oversaw revolutionary cattle cloning practices as CEO of Granada BioSciences, a company he founded. He served as chairman of the Texas A&M System Board of Regents from 1983 to 1989. The Oceanography & Meteorology Building on A&M's campus was named in his honor in 1988. In 2000, he was named executive vice president and president of DuPont's European operations. He is president of Eller Holding Company, a privately-held family investment company.
Instead of settling down after a life of amassing great wealth and personal achievement, he co-founded Houston-based Celltex Therapeutics Corporation in 2011 and put himself at the forefront of the contentious issue of autologous stem cell therapy in the name of fighting for ill people to harness the healing properties of their own bodies.
These days it is Celltex that drives Eller's passion, enabling him to combine his humanitarian and entrepreneurial impulses and perhaps one day leave a lasting mark on health care. It is the culmination of the journey he began on the A&M campus in the late 1950s.
"When I started this company I really didn't need another job," Eller said. "I certainly didn't need one with so many rules and regulations we had to adhere to that gives us a lot of headaches. All in all, the biggest reward out of it is seeing people improve their quality of life."
Since 2011, the company has helped treat approximately 600 patients between the ages of 6 and 96 by injecting stem cells taken from their own bodies into a troubled area with no complications, according to Eller. He believes Celltex's reach could expand tenfold if the entire operation could be conducted out of the United States, where the practice was banned in 2012, but that could take years of fighting a two-front war.
The daily war is educating as many doctors and potential patients as possible on the benefits of being treated with a one's own stem cells. The second, long-term war is maneuvering through the FDA's web of red tape that currently bans the practice from being performed on U.S. soil.
Eller spent four years in the Texas A&M Corps of Cadets until his 1959 graduation, which he says plays a major role in his character.
"Everything that I am, good or bad, really came from Texas A&M, and while I was in the Corps of Cadets that formulated a lot of discipline in my life and work ethic," he said. "Believe in yourself and have enough courage to take a step, just make sure you know where your step is when you put it down."
The science and history behind Celltex's first step begins with Dr. Stanley Jones, a renowned Houston spine surgeon and longtime friend of Eller's who received stem cell injections in Asia to relieve pain that prevented him from practicing.
Jones was at the operating table in 2009 at age 66 when he experienced crippling arthritic pain in his wrist that eventually spread across his body and wouldn't allow him to move around unassisted. After being diagnosed with psoriatic and rheumatoid arthritis, he underwent treatments that made him ill and was unable to take other medications because of the treatment's side effects. Jones scoured the globe for a solution in hopes of getting back into his scrubs. His exhaustive search lead him to receiving stem cell injections into an arthritic hip in Japan that saved him a hip replacement operation.
It was a revelation that inspired him to export the practice stateside.
"With both issues being made better within five months I felt it imperative that we do something with the technology that I had received in Asia," Jones said. "That's what caused me to push forward for starting stem cell therapy in America and do it the way I had been treated in Asia. I knew many Asians getting better with therapy and met those people personally. It was a moving experience. I felt like we should have a reasonable way to allow people to be treated in America."
Creation of Celltex
Jones reached out to Eller to start Celltex and licensed the technology used in Jones' operation from a now-defunct South Korean company RNL Bio to get U.S. operations rolling.
Armed with the new technology, the first of its kind in the U.S., Jones incorporated stem cell injections into a back operation on Texas Gov. Rick Perry in 2011 shortly after the practice was legalized in the U.S. But after operating on 200 patients after Perry, the FDA's stance that a person's own stem cells are a drug forced Celltex to put a brief hold on operations in 2012, barring it from injecting a person's autologous stem cells. To keep the company afloat, Eller had to find a way to adapt.
"David Eller has done a fabulous job in carrying us in where we are," Jones said. "He's prevented our demise. He's an incredible businessman and he's done fabulous things for mankind as far as I'm concerned."
As Celltex's practice stands today, it essentially serves as a bank for mesenchymal stem cells that can be used in regenerative therapies.
When patients come to Celltex experiencing an array of health problems ranging from daily joint wear and tear to severe arthritis, they enroll in a program that covers blood work to ensure the health of fat cells where MCSs can be found, extraction of the cells, cell culturing and storage for up to a year for a cost of $6,500. The stem cells are stored and cultured and multiplied by the hundreds of millions for 10 weeks. A pre-therapy evaluation is conducted by a patient's physician or a physician in the Celltex network.
To work around the FDA's ban on autologous stem cell treatments in the U.S., a box containing a patient's cultured cells is shipped to a Federal Commission for the Protection against Sanitary Risk-compliant hospital in Mexico run by American doctors where the injections are conducted at the cost of between $4,000 and $20,000, depending on the patient's needs and the number of cells used, according to Jones. Celltex helps organize flight and hotel arrangements for the Mexico trip for a lump sum of $6,000. From start to finish, the average cost of extraction, banking, travel and injections hovers around $32,000.
Eller's decision in 2012 to continue banking operations allows Celltex to conduct clinical trials on MSCs in their labs that could one day allow the company to bring treatment operations back into the U.S.
"Eller kept it going because he wouldn't let it stop," Jones said. "I didn't want it to stop but I couldn't do much about it because I was a practicing surgeon and I had to keep working. It's been expensive for us, but one of these days it will be commonplace and it will be fantastic."
After graduating from A&M in 1959, Eller was faced with a similar scenario at the start of his career: Try his hand in the sink-or-swim oil business or find solid financial ground to stand on until he could make his next move.
"Fortunately I had the U.S. military to go to, otherwise I probably would have been selling magazines," Eller said. "I tried to follow through life on the petroleum side but because the difficulty of the oil business always being feast or famine I always had to have some other alternate income that would give me some sustainability."
Eller fulfilled his military obligations and enlisted in the Army Corps of Engineers as a captain after graduation and was stationed in East Germany which proved to be an invaluable work experience when he returned to the U.S. in the mid-60s.
Had Eller decided to call it a day and not focused on his daily goal of spreading the stem cell gospel around Texas, life would be very different for six-year-old Tucker Beau Hyatt.
'This is it'
At 2 years old, Tucker Beau Hyatt ran a 105-degree fever, developed a rash and stopped walking. His knees swelled up to the size of softballs soon after, and he wouldn't be able to see his kneecaps again for another four years. The frail, freckled redhead was confined to a wheelchair and hooked to feeding tubes as systemic rheumatoid arthritis attacked his intestines and ran roughshod over his body from his toes to his intestines.
"It's a shock and then helplessness," Tucker Beau's mother, Linsey Hyatt, said. "There's not a ton of information out there, so you get frustrated. The disease isn't going to define who Tucker Beau is. We're going to push on and that's why we decided to do stem cells."
Tucker Beau was chosen as the Houston Arthritis Foundation's "hero" and was adopted as the poster child for juvenile arthritis, which led to the Hyatts making an appearance at an Earl Campbell luncheon in Houston a year-and-a -half ago, where Eller gave a presentation on Celltex.
The Hyatts -- fed up with watching their son endure chemotherapy, steroid and biologics injections for more than two years -- immediately put their trust in Eller.
"My husband Todd looked at me and said, 'This is it. This is what we're doing,'" Linsey Hyatt said.
Linsey and Todd Hyatt enrolled Tucker Beau in the banking and culturing program earlier this year before taking trips to Mexico to receive treatment in August with 300 million stem cells and another in November with 225 million stem cells. Linsey said he grew more than two inches and gained eight pounds in the months following the initial treatment. He can see his knees again. After years of struggling to get him to swallow chocolate milk, he comes home from kindergarten and makes himself peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Linsey said he missed 23 days of school this year due to the sickness that comes with weaning off of his drug cocktail before he received stem cell therapy, but the treatments gave Tucker Beau's 9-year-old sister, Kade, and a 10-year-old brother, Preston, an entirely new sibling.
"It's ridiculous my child is sitting here in the United States and having to suffer when there's something out there," Linsey said. "It's given us our child back. It makes you mad as a parent and I'm sure Mr. Eller feels the same way."
As Eller continues to be the butt of jokes on his ceaseless work life from Corps buddies on golfing, fly fishing and skiing trips, Tucker Beau is all the reason he needs to quiet them.
"Seeing this young boy who is born with arthritis and couldn't walk, had to have feeding tubes and a plethora of medicine, and to see him being able to take his own stem cells was a courageous step for his family and it was one for us to make sure everything went right," Eller said. "To see him improve the way he did in a short period of time is something that is not only remarkable, but is something that has given me inspiration to keep on doing what we're doing."
A strong base
After 35 years in corporate leadership positions, Eller is no stranger to the value of investments. The one he will have to make in Celltex's next generation of leadership will be responsible for guiding the company into accomplishing his long-term goal of availability and affordability of stem cell treatments.
"My vision is to improve the quality of life for people through technology," Eller said. "My mission in this is to build a company that has a strong base of young people who are technologically proficient in what they do and have the vision themselves to do the same things I'm talking about. I certainly don't plan being with this in the next decade or two, but I do plan on getting it started at a point where it will have enough traction to continue."
The importance of building a strong base came from his time at A&M.
As chair of the Board of Regents, Eller said A&M wasn't taking advantage of the millions of dollars it was spending on research every year and felt the school needed to commercialize its intellectual property. In 1986, the regents under Eller established the Texas A&M Health Science Center Institute of Biosciences and Technology in Houston, which became part of the world's largest medical center. The move laid the groundwork as a founding component of the A&M Health Science Center in College Station and more.
"It really was the seed of what's going on in College Station with the Health Science area and the big contract that Kalon has with Texas A&M with vaccine development and the magnitude of pharmaceutical stuff going on there," Eller said.
A&M sold off nearly half of Kalon to Tokyo-based FujiFilm in mid-December after the university made a $2.5 million investment in the company in 2011.
Eller's decision with the Board of Regents was made when he was in his late 50s. He said he knows there is a chance he might not be at the reigns of Celltex to see the pivotal early decisions he made pay off like the powerhouse the HSC became. With Tucker Beau as a tangible source inspiration, a Texas-grown, full-functioning stem cell treatment operation in Houston under Celltex is within reach.
"I don't know what I would do if I didn't have this to do," he said. "It's a labor of love and infatuation. I know I'm passionate about it and it motivates me to continue doing and give all that I've got to make it work."
If Eller chose to not take that first step toward creating Celltex alongside Jones in 2011, the view from his climb that started in 1959 at A&M might not be as pretty as where he could be standing in the coming years.
"There's a lot of entrepreneurs who have not been able to make it to the top of the hill," Eller said. "I can't say I've always been on the top of the hill, but I've always been on the right side of it. It's been a pretty good run for me."
12-24-14
http://www.theeagle.com/news/local/aggie-grad-happy-to-put-off-retiring-to-advance-stem/article_2acceda7-cab1-59ad-9c2a-5c38efa94abe.html
David Eller could have retired a long time ago.
At the age of 76, he could spend his days on permanent vacation fly-fishing in Idaho, golfing in San Antonio or skiing on the Italian-Austrian border like he has done to get away from work for many years.
He isn't working because he is desperate for money and accolades. He's had those for many years.
During the '80s, Eller oversaw revolutionary cattle cloning practices as CEO of Granada BioSciences, a company he founded. He served as chairman of the Texas A&M System Board of Regents from 1983 to 1989. The Oceanography & Meteorology Building on A&M's campus was named in his honor in 1988. In 2000, he was named executive vice president and president of DuPont's European operations. He is president of Eller Holding Company, a privately-held family investment company.
Instead of settling down after a life of amassing great wealth and personal achievement, he co-founded Houston-based Celltex Therapeutics Corporation in 2011 and put himself at the forefront of the contentious issue of autologous stem cell therapy in the name of fighting for ill people to harness the healing properties of their own bodies.
These days it is Celltex that drives Eller's passion, enabling him to combine his humanitarian and entrepreneurial impulses and perhaps one day leave a lasting mark on health care. It is the culmination of the journey he began on the A&M campus in the late 1950s.
"When I started this company I really didn't need another job," Eller said. "I certainly didn't need one with so many rules and regulations we had to adhere to that gives us a lot of headaches. All in all, the biggest reward out of it is seeing people improve their quality of life."
Since 2011, the company has helped treat approximately 600 patients between the ages of 6 and 96 by injecting stem cells taken from their own bodies into a troubled area with no complications, according to Eller. He believes Celltex's reach could expand tenfold if the entire operation could be conducted out of the United States, where the practice was banned in 2012, but that could take years of fighting a two-front war.
The daily war is educating as many doctors and potential patients as possible on the benefits of being treated with a one's own stem cells. The second, long-term war is maneuvering through the FDA's web of red tape that currently bans the practice from being performed on U.S. soil.
Eller spent four years in the Texas A&M Corps of Cadets until his 1959 graduation, which he says plays a major role in his character.
"Everything that I am, good or bad, really came from Texas A&M, and while I was in the Corps of Cadets that formulated a lot of discipline in my life and work ethic," he said. "Believe in yourself and have enough courage to take a step, just make sure you know where your step is when you put it down."
The science and history behind Celltex's first step begins with Dr. Stanley Jones, a renowned Houston spine surgeon and longtime friend of Eller's who received stem cell injections in Asia to relieve pain that prevented him from practicing.
Jones was at the operating table in 2009 at age 66 when he experienced crippling arthritic pain in his wrist that eventually spread across his body and wouldn't allow him to move around unassisted. After being diagnosed with psoriatic and rheumatoid arthritis, he underwent treatments that made him ill and was unable to take other medications because of the treatment's side effects. Jones scoured the globe for a solution in hopes of getting back into his scrubs. His exhaustive search lead him to receiving stem cell injections into an arthritic hip in Japan that saved him a hip replacement operation.
It was a revelation that inspired him to export the practice stateside.
"With both issues being made better within five months I felt it imperative that we do something with the technology that I had received in Asia," Jones said. "That's what caused me to push forward for starting stem cell therapy in America and do it the way I had been treated in Asia. I knew many Asians getting better with therapy and met those people personally. It was a moving experience. I felt like we should have a reasonable way to allow people to be treated in America."
Creation of Celltex
Jones reached out to Eller to start Celltex and licensed the technology used in Jones' operation from a now-defunct South Korean company RNL Bio to get U.S. operations rolling.
Armed with the new technology, the first of its kind in the U.S., Jones incorporated stem cell injections into a back operation on Texas Gov. Rick Perry in 2011 shortly after the practice was legalized in the U.S. But after operating on 200 patients after Perry, the FDA's stance that a person's own stem cells are a drug forced Celltex to put a brief hold on operations in 2012, barring it from injecting a person's autologous stem cells. To keep the company afloat, Eller had to find a way to adapt.
"David Eller has done a fabulous job in carrying us in where we are," Jones said. "He's prevented our demise. He's an incredible businessman and he's done fabulous things for mankind as far as I'm concerned."
As Celltex's practice stands today, it essentially serves as a bank for mesenchymal stem cells that can be used in regenerative therapies.
When patients come to Celltex experiencing an array of health problems ranging from daily joint wear and tear to severe arthritis, they enroll in a program that covers blood work to ensure the health of fat cells where MCSs can be found, extraction of the cells, cell culturing and storage for up to a year for a cost of $6,500. The stem cells are stored and cultured and multiplied by the hundreds of millions for 10 weeks. A pre-therapy evaluation is conducted by a patient's physician or a physician in the Celltex network.
To work around the FDA's ban on autologous stem cell treatments in the U.S., a box containing a patient's cultured cells is shipped to a Federal Commission for the Protection against Sanitary Risk-compliant hospital in Mexico run by American doctors where the injections are conducted at the cost of between $4,000 and $20,000, depending on the patient's needs and the number of cells used, according to Jones. Celltex helps organize flight and hotel arrangements for the Mexico trip for a lump sum of $6,000. From start to finish, the average cost of extraction, banking, travel and injections hovers around $32,000.
Eller's decision in 2012 to continue banking operations allows Celltex to conduct clinical trials on MSCs in their labs that could one day allow the company to bring treatment operations back into the U.S.
"Eller kept it going because he wouldn't let it stop," Jones said. "I didn't want it to stop but I couldn't do much about it because I was a practicing surgeon and I had to keep working. It's been expensive for us, but one of these days it will be commonplace and it will be fantastic."
After graduating from A&M in 1959, Eller was faced with a similar scenario at the start of his career: Try his hand in the sink-or-swim oil business or find solid financial ground to stand on until he could make his next move.
"Fortunately I had the U.S. military to go to, otherwise I probably would have been selling magazines," Eller said. "I tried to follow through life on the petroleum side but because the difficulty of the oil business always being feast or famine I always had to have some other alternate income that would give me some sustainability."
Eller fulfilled his military obligations and enlisted in the Army Corps of Engineers as a captain after graduation and was stationed in East Germany which proved to be an invaluable work experience when he returned to the U.S. in the mid-60s.
Had Eller decided to call it a day and not focused on his daily goal of spreading the stem cell gospel around Texas, life would be very different for six-year-old Tucker Beau Hyatt.
'This is it'
At 2 years old, Tucker Beau Hyatt ran a 105-degree fever, developed a rash and stopped walking. His knees swelled up to the size of softballs soon after, and he wouldn't be able to see his kneecaps again for another four years. The frail, freckled redhead was confined to a wheelchair and hooked to feeding tubes as systemic rheumatoid arthritis attacked his intestines and ran roughshod over his body from his toes to his intestines.
"It's a shock and then helplessness," Tucker Beau's mother, Linsey Hyatt, said. "There's not a ton of information out there, so you get frustrated. The disease isn't going to define who Tucker Beau is. We're going to push on and that's why we decided to do stem cells."
Tucker Beau was chosen as the Houston Arthritis Foundation's "hero" and was adopted as the poster child for juvenile arthritis, which led to the Hyatts making an appearance at an Earl Campbell luncheon in Houston a year-and-a -half ago, where Eller gave a presentation on Celltex.
The Hyatts -- fed up with watching their son endure chemotherapy, steroid and biologics injections for more than two years -- immediately put their trust in Eller.
"My husband Todd looked at me and said, 'This is it. This is what we're doing,'" Linsey Hyatt said.
Linsey and Todd Hyatt enrolled Tucker Beau in the banking and culturing program earlier this year before taking trips to Mexico to receive treatment in August with 300 million stem cells and another in November with 225 million stem cells. Linsey said he grew more than two inches and gained eight pounds in the months following the initial treatment. He can see his knees again. After years of struggling to get him to swallow chocolate milk, he comes home from kindergarten and makes himself peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Linsey said he missed 23 days of school this year due to the sickness that comes with weaning off of his drug cocktail before he received stem cell therapy, but the treatments gave Tucker Beau's 9-year-old sister, Kade, and a 10-year-old brother, Preston, an entirely new sibling.
"It's ridiculous my child is sitting here in the United States and having to suffer when there's something out there," Linsey said. "It's given us our child back. It makes you mad as a parent and I'm sure Mr. Eller feels the same way."
As Eller continues to be the butt of jokes on his ceaseless work life from Corps buddies on golfing, fly fishing and skiing trips, Tucker Beau is all the reason he needs to quiet them.
"Seeing this young boy who is born with arthritis and couldn't walk, had to have feeding tubes and a plethora of medicine, and to see him being able to take his own stem cells was a courageous step for his family and it was one for us to make sure everything went right," Eller said. "To see him improve the way he did in a short period of time is something that is not only remarkable, but is something that has given me inspiration to keep on doing what we're doing."
A strong base
After 35 years in corporate leadership positions, Eller is no stranger to the value of investments. The one he will have to make in Celltex's next generation of leadership will be responsible for guiding the company into accomplishing his long-term goal of availability and affordability of stem cell treatments.
"My vision is to improve the quality of life for people through technology," Eller said. "My mission in this is to build a company that has a strong base of young people who are technologically proficient in what they do and have the vision themselves to do the same things I'm talking about. I certainly don't plan being with this in the next decade or two, but I do plan on getting it started at a point where it will have enough traction to continue."
The importance of building a strong base came from his time at A&M.
As chair of the Board of Regents, Eller said A&M wasn't taking advantage of the millions of dollars it was spending on research every year and felt the school needed to commercialize its intellectual property. In 1986, the regents under Eller established the Texas A&M Health Science Center Institute of Biosciences and Technology in Houston, which became part of the world's largest medical center. The move laid the groundwork as a founding component of the A&M Health Science Center in College Station and more.
"It really was the seed of what's going on in College Station with the Health Science area and the big contract that Kalon has with Texas A&M with vaccine development and the magnitude of pharmaceutical stuff going on there," Eller said.
A&M sold off nearly half of Kalon to Tokyo-based FujiFilm in mid-December after the university made a $2.5 million investment in the company in 2011.
Eller's decision with the Board of Regents was made when he was in his late 50s. He said he knows there is a chance he might not be at the reigns of Celltex to see the pivotal early decisions he made pay off like the powerhouse the HSC became. With Tucker Beau as a tangible source inspiration, a Texas-grown, full-functioning stem cell treatment operation in Houston under Celltex is within reach.
"I don't know what I would do if I didn't have this to do," he said. "It's a labor of love and infatuation. I know I'm passionate about it and it motivates me to continue doing and give all that I've got to make it work."
If Eller chose to not take that first step toward creating Celltex alongside Jones in 2011, the view from his climb that started in 1959 at A&M might not be as pretty as where he could be standing in the coming years.
"There's a lot of entrepreneurs who have not been able to make it to the top of the hill," Eller said. "I can't say I've always been on the top of the hill, but I've always been on the right side of it. It's been a pretty good run for me."