Executive Q&A: Jim Hendricks, President, Seattle Childrens Research Institute

Jim Hendricks has presided over dramatic growth at Seattle Childrens Research Institute. The organization now has more than a thousand employees and Hendricks has an ambitious plan to develop a 2-million-square-foot campus in downtown Seattle.

EARLY YEARS: I grew up in Green Bay, Wisconsin, but now I root for the Seahawks, much to my parents chagrin. My father, who had no university education, became president of a company that made specialized coating products for food containers. He started at the company painting drums.

CAREER: My first job was as assistant professor of pathology at the University of Florida. I was responsible for a university lab that did esoteric reference testing. When the chairman of the department went on sabbatical three years into my job, he left a memo naming me as executive director of all the labs. He had never talked to me about it. I didnt know how to read a profit and loss statement. I was thrown into the deep end and told to swim. Later, I became vice president of research at the Childrens Hospital of New Orleans.

LESSONS: I learned that administration is not like science. You have to listen especially when you are surrounded by intelligent people who are all passionate. You have to make decisions about what makes good science. I was never a great scientist but I was an OK administrator.

PROUDEST ACHIEVEMENT: When I was recruited [in 2003], Seattle Childrens had just decided to invest in research. It didnt have a facility but there were trustees who had children who had suffered, and they had a vision that research could put the childrens hospital out of business [by coming up with cures for pediatric diseases]. I fell in love with that vision. [The institute was officially created in 2006.] …We have achieved what was above and beyond my wildest imagination. For the past decade, weve had year-over-year growth of 17 percent. When I started, we had 40 employees and $6 million in funding. Now, we have 1,100 employees and an annual budget of $110 million. Ten years ago, we were 20th in the nation in NIH [National Institutes of Health] funding. Now, we are fifth. You surround yourself with [the kind of] scientists you can never be, and you play a supporting role.

CHILDRENS HOSPITAL: Childrens hospitals are the only show in town when it comes to pediatric diseases, almost all of which are orphan diseases [that affect fewer than 250,000 persons]. The federal government doesnt fund pediatric research at the same level you would expect based on the population of children; children make a bad lobby. We run the gamut of basic and applied research through clinical research and health services outcomes research.

RESEARCH: We are doing research on cancer, autism, cystic fibrosis, lupus you name the disease and we have a researcher. Ninety percent of our scientists are physicians. We have great scientists like David Rawlings, who directs our laboratory for immunotherapy and is working on children with rare genetic disorders. His research is translated into discoveries that he then brings to his patients. His lab has developed state-of-the-art technology to either replace a missing gene or repair a genetic defect. That has great promise for treating conditions like leukemia. The quality of care at an organization that has its own research program has got to be a world apart from the quality of care of a physician who has only seen the disease in a textbook.

PARTNERSHIPS: You are not going to
find a venture capitalist or small company that will invest in pediatrics. The typical path is for a drug to be tested for adults and then tried out on children. I want them to think about it in parallel. We have a program with Elizabeth Aylward that is designed to spur partnerships. We are looking for small companies that have a possible product for use in pediatrics but dont have the cash to do trials to establish their effectiveness. Kineta is a good example. We are doing tests for one of their drugs on cells of urine samples of children to see if its worthwhile moving forward. We considered participating in a funding round of Accelerator Corp. [a biotech investment company] on the condition that we could talk to every participant about a potential pediatric application.

PHILANTHROPY: We have a very generous community. Last year, the institute received $29 million in philanthropic support. We also received a $75 million charitable trust last fall from the estate of Jack MacDonald. Its the largest known gift to a U.S. childrens hospital for pediatric research. MacDonalds mother was a member of a guild [that raised money for Seattle Childrens]. We have 26 research guilds that raise money for everything from mitochondrial disease to brain cancer. The guilds also form family support networks for patients who are newly diagnosed.

VISION: There are few places that have the combination of clinical expertise and research expertise that we have, but we are running out of space. Today, our institute [in downtown Seattle] has 330,000 square feet of clinical and laboratory space. We have another building next door that we are leasing out to pay for new lab space we desperately need and are looking for. And we just submitted a pre-master use permit for a 600,000-square-foot building on a parking lot we own nearby. Our vision is for a campus that is one day two million square feet, the size of Boston Childrens, the countrys largest childrens hospital. Philadelphia, the second largest, has 1.5 million. They are both challenged for space. Weve got plenty of space to grow on. And because we are downtown we can grow high. With UWs [downtown research lab] and the [Fred] Hutch nearby, we are close to the action. There is a lot of collaboration with the other labs.

PERSONAL INTERESTS: Ive been a woodworker for 25 years. My wife cant stand that the garage is a woodshop, but I like making furniture for my kids. Im also passionate about the Toyota production system. Ive visited many factories in Japan, including furniture, cookie and auto manufacturers, to see how team members contribute. Weve applied lean principles across the administration and saved close to $1 million by avoiding waste. When we do construction, we model the space in a warehouse with cardboard and fake walls before building to make sure that the relationship with adjoining space makes sense for the flow of materials and people. You design for the work you are doing.