Before arriving in the city last month, the only time Peter Meintjes had been in Dunedin was for a conference about 20 years ago.
His main recollection was the generous bar tab at the event, undeniably fairly memorable for a young university student. But this time his arrival is very different; he and his family have moved more than 15,000km to settle in the city and the affable molecular diagnostics and genomics business leader says he is "very happy to be here".
The new chief executive of NZX-listed cancer diagnostic company Pacific Edge — a role he describes as very meaningful — replaces long-serving predecessor David Darling.
Based in the Centre for Innovation at the University of Otago, Pacific Edge specialises in the discovery and commercialisation of diagnostic and prognostic tests for better detection and management of cancer.
The company was developing and commercialising its range of Cxbladder bladder cancer tests globally through its wholly owned central laboratories in New Zealand and the United States. The company’s products have been tested and validated in international multi-centre clinical studies.
The chief executive position was complementary to Dr Meintjes’ own career whose most recent role was chief commercial officer at Eurofins-Transplant Genomics, a Massachusetts transplant diagnostics company.
In that role, he led the commercialisation of the company’s suite of tests for biomarkers of organ rejection, including the flagship product TruGraf, the only biomarker test for kidney transplant recipients approved for reimbursement by US national health insurance system administrator, the Centres for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Prior to that, he spent six years with Omixon, a Hungarian global molecular diagnostics company focused on pre-transplant organ and recipient compatibility testing.
With Omixon, he occupied senior roles in both Hungary and the United States, ending his tenure after three years as chief executive.
In that role, he presided over the rapid expansion of Omixon, including delivering compound annual revenue growth of more than 75%.
Cape Town born Dr Meintjes’ business career started in New Zealand, a country where his family shifted to from South Africa when he was a teenager.
It was the late 1990s and his parents were very focused on education for their four children. After several years at Kings College, he spent 10 years at the University of Auckland which culminated in him gaining a PhD in biological sciences in 2008.
Asked what his dream career was growing up, Dr Meintjes reckoned if his parents were asked, it would have been an engineer, given the amount of time he spent playing with Lego.
The real answer was he was not sure. He did not have a defined idea of a career path and often said he would keep doing what captured his interest.
While he loved doing his PhD, he exhausted himself intellectually at university and, towards the end of his time there, decided an academic career was not for him.
He finished his PhD in under four years and, at the time, there was a cash-based performance incentive. He was given $6000 which he used for travel.
Looking for a job, he began contacting his network. He knew the man who founded Biomatters, an Auckland bio-informatics company, and he asked if he could take him for coffee to learn a little about the biotech industry in New Zealand.
The founder had gone back to academia and gave him an introduction to the chief executive which led to a role at the company.
It was August last year when he was contacted by an Australian recruitment firm about a possible job in New Zealand.
While he took the call, he had been contacted previously and, in many cases, the jobs on offer had not measured up on a global scale, he said.
When he heard it was Pacific Edge, he admitted he was "kind of smiling internally". He had met Mr Darling at a conference 12 years earlier, knew several other people at the company, and "knew roughly what they did".
As the recruiter started "walking" him through the business, including several milestone achievements, he acknowledged those were a big deal.
He was in discussions with three other companies at the same time but said the recruitment firm did a very good job in whetting his interest in Pacific Edge.
His wife was in Hungary at the time, having taken the couple’s two young sons to visit their grandparents and he asked her to give moving to Dunedin some serious thought. Not surprisingly, she was a little apprehensive.
When it emerged he was a serious contender, there was talk about why he could not do the job from the United States, given that was where 95% of Pacific Edge’s market was.
But, after talking more to both the recruitment firm and Pacific Edge chairman Chris Gallaher, it became obvious that Dunedin was the nerve centre for decision-making.
While he could try to do it from overseas, if he wanted to really "rally the troops" and be at the core of the company, then a move was needed.
He also realised that, from the company’s perspective, he would do a better job by being in New Zealand and he developed a level of confidence in that.
He still had family in Auckland but he realised that he could not spend time "selling" the concept of moving to New Zealand to his wife, it had to be something she also wanted to do.
A move from Boston to Dunedin — in the heart of New Zealand’s pie-eating culture — was one of the many little intangible benefits that came from such a shift. He had missed eating pies so much while living in the US that he started making his own.
Looking at all the small intangible positive factors from such a move, the couple realised they could have a "really good life".
They had both enjoyed living in the US, where there were "a lot of life’s conveniences" — "there’s almost-same-day delivery on Amazon".
His wife had always wanted to live by the ocean and he was encouraging her to take up surfing on the Otago coast. Hungary had a proud winemaking culture and the couple were keen to find a weekend to drive to Central Otago, while they were also excited about exploring more of their environs.
As far as Pacific Edge was concerned, its business prospects were "fantastic"; it had strong intellectual property and a clear vision for how it was going to turn that into products.
For Dr Meintjes, initially, it was about getting a handle on what was working, what was not and amplifying those things that were working. It was more about tinkering with the strategy rather than making big changes, he said.
He had an opportunity for some transition time with Mr Darling. Dr Meintjes consulted for the board from November 1 and had an opportunity to talk to those in the company, from investors and analysts to board members, sales directors and executives, to prepare him for arriving in Dunedin. He and Mr Darling also had done one-on-one meetings.
"I’ve already been asked to make a couple of decisions and to have that background was definitely helpful," he said.
The family had a two-week stay in MIQ in Christchurch, not necessarily the easiest with two young children — aged 2½ and 10 months — and Dr Meintjes quipped the photographs he was sending to family of wine glasses and cheese platters was not representative of their stay.
After completing MIQ, the couple sent their bags to Dunedin and flew to Auckland to see Dr Meintjes’ family — it was the first time they had been together in five years, including his London-dwelling sister.
He came down to Dunedin on a Thursday, and went into the office on the Friday for a "T-shirt kind of day" with Mr Darling, spending six hours together and also meeting staff.
Dr Meintjes relished the opportunity to run a top-tier cancer diagnostics company which was not only a Dunedin and New Zealand company, but a global one.
The fact 95% of its business was done in the US meant his skill set was relevant and its commercial successes put it on par with other well-known New Zealand exporting companies.
The transplant community, which he had previously been involved in, was generally a very empathetic community, and cancer diagnostics was not particularly dissimilar to that — helping people with early diagnosis and treatment options.
There was definitely a sense of maintaining its understated nature and letting its results "speak for themselves". It was also important to get its clinical message out there.
Hopefully, all of New Zealand would be covered by Cxbladder in the not too distant future. Those using it were very strong advocates for the business, he said.
