Amir Heshmatpour was young when he left Iran for the United States, too young to have known that the country of his birth was about to change beyond recognition.
His father, a successful businessman who owned movie theaters and hotels in Iran, had secured visas for Heshmatpour and his two eldest sisters before the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The intention was education and opportunity in America. His father subsequently returned to Iran, where the revolution intervened.
“He went back to Iran, and then the revolution started,” Heshmatpour told The Jerusalem Post during a visit to Israel this week. After the Shah was overthrown and the new Islamic regime took power, his father was arrested, imprisoned, and tortured.
It was an experience, Heshmatpour said, that “took a lot of years off of his life.” His father died at 46, leaving Heshmatpour, then around 19 and the only son among five children, to assume responsibility for his mother and sisters.
“Losing my father was probably the worst day of my life,” he said. “But it also has made me who I am today.”
More than four decades after leaving Iran, that history has left Heshmatpour with two missions that at first appear to have little connection.
One is fighting brain cancer. The other, as he sees it, is fighting what he regards as a cancer afflicting Iran itself.
“I’m fighting cancer on two fronts,” he said. “One for the brain, and one for the Iranian people.”
‘Iran deserves better’
Heshmatpour grew up in Pennsylvania at a particularly difficult time to be the only Iranian child in his school. Shortly after his arrival, revolutionaries in Tehran seized the US Embassy and took 52 Americans hostage.
At home, however, his family maintained its Iranian culture. He describes the family orientation of Persian society as something familiar to Israelis and other peoples of the Middle East. At the same time, the family had to begin again in America after having enjoyed considerable success in Iran.
Today, Heshmatpour lives in Los Angeles and has built a business career spanning telecommunications, investment, and biotechnology. But his assessment of what happened to the country his family left remains uncompromising.
“There’s so much resources there. There’s so much human capital there, [a] very highly educated population, very resourceful,” he said.
He compares the Islamic Republic’s stewardship of Iran to a management team destroying a potentially successful company.
“You couldn’t have asked for a worse management than what we have over there,” he said. “It’s just devastating what is happening there.”
Heshmatpour is equally certain that the current system will not last.
“I 100% believe there’ll be a change,” he said. “And that change is going to be for the better.”
That conviction is personal. What happened to his father, he said, has made helping to bring about change in Iran “a mission of mine.”
The other cancer
Heshmatpour’s second mission is more literal.
He is chairman and CEO of NeOnc Technologies Holdings, a Nasdaq-listed biotechnology company developing treatments for brain cancer. He acquired the company’s technology from the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine and said its portfolio includes 179 patents relating to brain-cancer drugs and drug delivery.
His involvement is personal here, too.
Heshmatpour normally manages his family’s investments rather than taking day-to-day control of individual companies. NeOnc was different. His wife’s brother died of brain cancer at just six years old.
“I felt there was a calling for me to run the company myself,” he said. “I’m all in. I’m fully committed.”
The company’s lead asset, NEO100, is administered intranasally using a nebulizer, an approach designed to bypass the blood-brain barrier, one of the major obstacles in delivering drugs to the brain.
Heshmatpour said the company’s Phase 2a data for patients with recurrent high-grade brain tumors showed an average progression-free survival of 26.1 months, compared with the six-to-nine-month figure he cited for the current standard of care. He also said 24% of the trial sample experienced total tumor remission.
Those remain company-reported results from an experimental treatment, and Heshmatpour is careful not to describe the drug as a cure.
What he does believe, however, is that it could change the standard of care.
Israel is intended to be part of that effort.
Heshmatpour said NeOnc is preparing trials involving approximately 450 patients across some 30 hospitals in the United States, Israel, and the United Arab Emirates. Israeli approval remains pending, but he said he hopes trials will begin here shortly.
During his current visit, he was also due to meet the family of an eight-year-old boy with brain cancer who is expected to travel to the US to receive the treatment. Heshmatpour hopes that approval in Israel will eventually allow such patients to receive continuing care closer to home.
For a businessman who has spent most of his life in America, Israel was an obvious place to expand.
“Israel is, I think, on par with the US,” he said of the country’s biotechnology sector. “The talent, the human capital, and the resources here are on par with the US.”
Iran, Israel and the future
There is another reason Israel occupies an unusual place in Heshmatpour’s story.
His wife is Jewish, as was his first business partner, while Jewish friends, partners, and investors have played a significant role throughout his career. Members of his extended Iranian family have also married Jews.
“We’re all the same,” he said. “Just some people like to fan the fire, [and] divide cultures and religions.”
Heshmatpour’s visit also included a Torah dedication at the Western Wall connected to Rabbi Yoshiyahu Pinto, with whom he has developed a close relationship.
His combination of Iranian roots, American success, and Jewish connections inevitably brings the conversation back to what Iran could become after the Islamic Republic.
Heshmatpour believes the Iranian diaspora will have a responsibility to return its expertise and resources to the country when that day arrives.
“I think every one of us has the obligation, once that regime changes, to do whatever necessary to make that country how it was during His Majesty’s days,” he said.
He envisages a future Iran attracting investment from its diaspora and working with countries it currently regards as enemies, including Israel.
“You’re going to have a lot of people that will put in their time, effort, and resources to make that country flourish again, to partner with the right countries like Israel and Abu Dhabi,” he said.
For Heshmatpour, that possibility connects the two seemingly separate battles that now consume much of his time.
One is being fought in laboratories and hospitals, against a disease that took a six-year-old member of his wife’s family. The other began when his father returned to revolutionary Iran and never truly recovered from what was done to him there.
Nearly half a century later, Heshmatpour believes both can be beaten.
“I think it’s time for this part of the world [to have] real peace,” he said. “Once you eliminate the cancer, everything will change.”