Takeda executive hikes up Mount Fuji to promote need for plasma donations

Takeda’s Chi Onyebuchi will soon be climbing up Mount Fuji.Photo courtesy of Takeda

Chi Onyebuchi didn’t know climbing Mount Fuji would be part of the job description.

Yet here she is, gamely planning a trip up Japan’s highest mountain later this week. It’s all part of an effort by Takeda Pharmaceutical Co., her employer, to celebrate the arrival of plasma-derived therapies in the Japanese market and to underscore the global need for donated plasma, to ensure these therapies can continue.

Onyebuchi has been director of plasma therapies at Takeda for the past six years at its Cambridge office. So this marks an important milestone for her professional life, and for the Japanese company, Massachusetts’s largest life sciences employer. In her spare time, she prefers running around her neighborhood to climbing mountains, but she’s adventurous and raised her hand when she heard a dozen of her colleagues would be making the trek up the 12,400-foot volcano. Weather permitting, the group will hike to a hut on the mountain on Aug. 29 and then wake up hours before dawn on Aug. 30 to make the summit in time for sunrise, before heading back down. They will take the 12-mile long Gotemba trail.

“For me, it’s like stepping into something that represents a steep journey that many of our patients face,” Onyebuchi said. “Many of us have never hiked up a mountain that high. There’s some nervousness, some excitement. What I really look forward to is to be able to do this as a team, to face our challenges as a team.”

For training, she’s hitting the stair-climbing machine four times a week at her local Planet Fitness, as well as some actual hiking, though the Fuji trek will be her first significant mountain hike. About four-dozen of her colleagues have already started a parallel challenge, a “virtual climb” of sorts, by making as many steps as they can, and competing with coworkers for prizes. Mark Toskey, a local Takeda executive, is leading the way in that contest.

“We were thinking about ways to recognize all of the effort to bring these therapies” to Japan, Onyebuchi said. “It took on a life of its own, with many colleagues being involved in trying to support us toward this climb.”

This is an installment of our weekly Bold Types column about the movers and shakers on Boston’s business scene.

Jon Chesto can be reached at jon.chesto@globe.com. Follow him @jonchesto.