Genentech

Author: Sally Smith Hughes
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226359204
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 231

Book Description
In the fall of 1980, Genentech, Inc., a little-known California genetic engineering company, became the overnight darling of Wall Street, raising over $38 million in its initial public stock offering. Lacking marketed products or substantial profit, the firm nonetheless saw its share price escalate from $35 to $89 in the first few minutes of trading, at that point the largest gain in stock market history. Coming at a time of economic recession and declining technological competitiveness in the United States, the event provoked banner headlines and ignited a period of speculative frenzy over biotechnology as a revolutionary means for creating new and better kinds of pharmaceuticals, untold profit, and a possible solution to national economic malaise. Drawing from an unparalleled collection of interviews with early biotech players, Sally Smith Hughes offers the first book-length history of this pioneering company, depicting Genentech’s improbable creation, precarious youth, and ascent to immense prosperity. Hughes provides intimate portraits of the people significant to Genentech’s science and business, including cofounders Herbert Boyer and Robert Swanson, and in doing so sheds new light on how personality affects the growth of science. By placing Genentech’s founders, followers, opponents, victims, and beneficiaries in context, Hughes also demonstrates how science interacts with commercial and legal interests and university research, and with government regulation, venture capital, and commercial profits. Integrating the scientific, the corporate, the contextual, and the personal, Genentech tells the story of biotechnology as it is not often told, as a risky and improbable entrepreneurial venture that had to overcome a number of powerful forces working against it.

Science Lessons

Author: Gordon M. Binder
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 326

Book Description
Under Gordon Binder's leadership, Amgen became the world's largest and most successful biotech company in the world. This text describes what it really takes to manage risk, financing, creative employees, and intellectual property on the international stage.

Biotechnology Entrepreneurship

Author: Craig Shimasaki
Publisher: Academic Press
ISBN: 0124047475
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 489

Book Description
As an authoritative guide to biotechnology enterprise and entrepreneurship, Biotechnology Entrepreneurship and Management supports the international community in training the biotechnology leaders of tomorrow. Outlining fundamental concepts vital to graduate students and practitioners entering the biotech industry in management or in any entrepreneurial capacity, Biotechnology Entrepreneurship and Management provides tested strategies and hard-won lessons from a leading board of educators and practitioners. It provides a 'how-to' for individuals training at any level for the biotech industry, from macro to micro. Coverage ranges from the initial challenge of translating a technology idea into a working business case, through securing angel investment, and in managing all aspects of the result: business valuation, business development, partnering, biological manufacturing, FDA approvals and regulatory requirements. An engaging and user-friendly style is complemented by diverse diagrams, graphics and business flow charts with decision trees to support effective management and decision making. - Provides tested strategies and lessons in an engaging and user-friendly style supplemented by tailored pedagogy, training tips and overview sidebars - Case studies are interspersed throughout each chapter to support key concepts and best practices. - Enhanced by use of numerous detailed graphics, tables and flow charts

From Breakthrough to Blockbuster

Author: Donald L. Drakeman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195084004
Category : Biotechnology industries
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Book Description
"Beginning in the 1970s, several scientific breakthroughs promised to transform the creation of new medicines. As investors sought to capitalize on these Nobel Prize-winning discoveries, the biotech industry grew to thousands of small companies around the world. Each sought to emulate what the major pharmaceutical companies had been doing for a century or more, but without the advantages of scale, scope, experience, and massive resources. How could a large collection of small companies, most with fewer than 50 employees, compete in one of the world's most breathtakingly expensive and highly regulated industries? This book shows how biotech companies have met the challenge by creating nearly 40% more of the most important treatments for unmet medical needs. Moreover, they have done so with much lower overall costs. The book focuses on both the companies themselves and the broader biotech ecosystem that supports them. Its portrait of the crucial roles played by academic research, venture capital, contract research organizations, the capital markets, and pharmaceutical companies shows how a supportive environment enabled the entrepreneurial biotech industry to create novel medicines with unprecedented efficiency. In doing so, it also offers insights for any industry seeking to innovate in uncertain and ambiguous conditions. Looking to the future, it concludes that biomedical research will continue to be most effective in the hands of a large group of small companies as long as national healthcare policies allow the rest of the ecosystem to continue to thrive"--

Gene Jockeys

Author: Nicolas Rasmussen
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421413418
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Book Description
The scientific scramble to discover the first generation of drugs created through genetic engineering. The biotech arena emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, when molecular biology, one of the fastest-moving areas of basic science in the twentieth century, met the business world. Gene Jockeys is a detailed study of the biotech projects that led to five of the first ten recombinant DNA drugs to be approved for medical use in the United States: human insulin, human growth hormone, alpha interferon, erythropoietin, and tissue plasminogen activator. Drawing on corporate documents obtained from patent litigation, as well as interviews with the ambitious biologists who called themselves gene jockeys, historian Nicolas Rasmussen chronicles the remarkable, and often secretive, work of the scientists who built a new domain between academia and the drug industry in the pursuit of intellectual rewards and big payouts. In contrast to some who critique the rise of biotechnology, Rasmussen contends that biotech was not a swindle, even if the public did pay a very high price for the development of what began as public scientific resources. Within the biotech enterprise, the work of corporate scientists went well beyond what biologists had already accomplished within universities, and it accelerated the medical use of the new drugs by several years. In his technically detailed and readable narrative, Rasmussen focuses on the visible and often heavy hands that construct and maintain the markets in public goods like science. He looks closely at how science follows money, and vice versa, as researchers respond to the pressures and potential rewards of commercially viable innovations. In biotechnology, many of those engaged in crafting markets for genetically engineered drugs were biologists themselves who were in fact trying to do science. This book captures that heady, fleeting moment when a biologist could expect to do great science through the private sector and be rewarded with both wealth and scientific acclaim.

Her-2

Author: Robert Bazell
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0307764982
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Book Description
Two years after she underwent a mastectomy and chemotherapy, Barbara Bradfield's aggressive breast cancer had recurred and spread to her lungs. The outlook was grim. Then she took part in Genentech's clinical trials for a new drug. Five years later she remains cancer-free. Her-2 is the biography of Herceptin, the drug that provoked dramatic responses in Barbara Bradfield and other women in the trials and that offers promise for hundreds of thousands of breast cancer patients. Unlike chemotherapy or radiation, Herceptin has no disabling side effects. It works by inactivating Her-2/neu--a protein that makes cancer cells grow especially quickly-- produced by a gene found in 25 to 30 percent of all breast tumors. Herceptin caused some patients' cancers to disappear completely; in others, it slowed the progression of the disease and gave the women months or years they wouldn't otherwise have had. Herceptin is the first treatment targeted at a gene defect that gives rise to cancer. It marks the beginning of a new era of treatment for all kinds of cancers. Robert Bazell presents a riveting account of how Herceptin was born. Her-2 is a story of dramatic discoveries and strong personalities, showing the combination of scientific investigation, money, politics, ego, corporate decisions, patient activism, and luck involved in moving this groundbreaking drug from the lab to a patient's bedside. Bazell's deft portraits introduce us to the remarkable people instrumental in Herceptin's history, including Dr. Dennis Slamon, the driven UCLA oncologist who played the primary role in developing the treatment; Lily Tartikoff, wife of television executive Brandon Tartikoff, who tapped into Hollywood money and glamour to help fund Slamon's research; and Marti Nelson, who inspired the activists who lobbied for a "compassionate use" program that would allow women outside the clinical trials to have access to the limited supplies of Herceptin prior to FDA approval of the drug. And throughout there are the stories of the heroic women with advanced breast cancer who volunteered for the trials, risking what time they had left on an unproven treatment. Meticulously researched, written with clarity and compassion, Her-2 is masterly reporting on cutting-edge science.

The Recombinant University

Author: Doogab Yi
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022614383X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 331

Book Description
This title examines the history of biotechnology when it was new, especially when synonymous with recombinant DNA technology. It focuses on the academic community in the San Francisco Bay Area where recombinant DNA technology was developed and adopted as the first major commercial technology for genetic engineering at Stanford in the 1970s. The book argues that biotechnology was initially a hybrid creation of academic and commercial institutions held together by the assumption of a positive relationship between private ownership and the public interest.

The Billion-Dollar Molecule

Author: Barry Werth
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0671510576
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 480

Book Description
This inside account of Vertex, a start-up pharmaceutical company, conveys the exciting drama being played out in the pioneering and enormously profitable field of drug research. Vertex is dedicated to designing--atom by atom--a new life-saving immunosuppressant drug that has major implications for HIV research.

The Antidote

Author: Barry Werth
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1451655665
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 448

Book Description
In 1989, the charismatic Joshua Boger left Merck, then America's most admired business, to found a drug company that would challenge industry giants and transform health care. Journalist Barry Werth described the company's tumultuous early days during the AIDS crisis in The Billion-Dollar Molecule, a celebrated classic of science and business journalism. Now he returns to tell the story of Vertex's bold endurance and eventual success. The pharmaceutical business is America's toughest and one of its most profitable. It's riskier and more rigorous at just about every stage than any other business, from the towering biological uncertainties inherent in its mission to treat disease; to the 30-to-1 failure rate in bringing out a successful medicine; to the multibillion-dollar cost of ramping up a successful product; to operating in the world's most regulated industry, matched only by nuclear power. Werth captures the full scope of Vertex's 25-year drive to deliver breakthrough medicines.--From publisher description.

The Business of Bioscience

Author: Craig D. Shimasaki
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1441900640
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 282

Book Description
My journey into this fascinating field of biotechnology started about 26 years ago at a small biotechnology company in South San Francisco called Genentech. I was very fortunate to work for the company that begat the biotech industry during its formative years. This experience established a solid foundation from which I could grow in both the science and business of biotechnology. After my fourth year of working on Oyster Point Boulevard, a close friend and colleague left Genentech to join a start-up biotechnology company. Later, he approached me to leave and join him in of all places – Oklahoma. He persisted for at least a year before I seriously considered his proposal. After listening to their plans, the opportunity suddenly became more and more intriguing. Finally, I took the plunge and joined this ent- preneurial team in cofounding and growing a start-up biotechnology company. Making that fateful decision to leave the security of a larger company was extremely difficult, but it turned out to be the beginning of an entrepreneurial career that forever changed how I viewed the biotechnology industry. Since that time, I have been fortunate to have cofounded two other biotechnology com- nies and even participated in taking one of them public. During my career in these start-ups, I held a variety of positions, from directing the science, operations, regulatory, and marketing components, to subsequently becoming CEO.