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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

The Amgen Success Story: Can Lightning Strike Again?

The Amgen Success Story: Can Lightning Strike Again? By JACQUELINE FOX Staff Reporter The founders of Amgen Inc. may have been armed with $19 million in startup capital, but even they didn’t have a solid idea about what they were going to use it for when they first launched the company in Thousand Oaks in 1981. Amgen’s small army of about 35 research scientists were conducting experiments for an emerging industry known as biotech, but what they were aiming for was anyone’s guess. “We weren’t even sure pharmaceutical was where we were going to end up,” said Dennis Fenton, one of Amgen’s first 50 employees. He started with the company in 1982 at the age of 29 as a research scientist and was recently named vice president for operations, manufacturing, process development, quality and information management. In fact, one of Amgen’s first “bio-breakthroughs,” according to Fenton, was what he called the “accidental” creation of a non-chemical indigo dye, which the company tried to market to blue jeans manufacturers, such as Levi Strauss & Co. Amgen even worked with big oil firms conducting bio-remediation research for soil cleanup projects. “We were funded by a number of companies to look into that, but didn’t get anywhere,” said Fenton. Of course, most in the industry know the rest of the Amgen story and have tracked the company through the early days, from its first patent for the red blood stimulant EPOGEN in 1987 to the recent announcement of its planned acquisition of rival Immunex. But industry experts, and even Fenton, agree that the astonishing growth of the company, from a one-building research lab next to a piano shop to a multi-billion-dollar corporate titan, is a success story any number of small biotech firms in the Sam Fernando Valley could be in the process of rewriting. Why? “Because the biotech revolution isn’t over,” said Ahmen Enany, executive director of the Southern California Biomedical Council. “Biotech is really very new. It’s a baby. We are still going through the revolution and, because the science is changing every year, anyone can jump up and dominate and turn their product into the next big thing.” According to Enany, the two-year-old Protein Pathways, which moved its offices to Woodland Hills from Westwood in January, is a good example of a company to watch closely. “They are in the drug discovery business, like Amgen, involving the use of proteins, and there’s obviously a lot of potential in this area,” said Enany. “If a company can come up with a compound to diagnose and treat diseases like Alzheimer’s, for example, it could be a company 10 times the size of Amgen. That’s a no-brainer.” Protein Pathways Vice President Bill Boyle had a couple of other reasons for why he thinks his company is on the right track. “I agree with that assessment, because of the kind of technology we are using, bioinformatics, or the computational approach to drug discovery, as opposed to the traditional empirical method,” Boyle said. “We think our advances certainly could lead to a stand-alone company that is a major pharmaceutical company with lots of investors.” The second reason: the company braintrust. Boyle was director of research at Amgen for 11 years. Pathway’s CEO, Daniel Vapnek, was one of Amgen’s original employees, and two of the company’s board members worked on Amgen’s original business plan. Boyle and the board members, he said, also have close relationships with top biotech venture capitalists, including former Amgen CEO and Chairman Gordon Binder. But what will it take for a biotech startup with a much smaller profile and braintrust to attract venture capital? Certainly more than revenue projections and fancy lab space, said Stevan Birnbaum, president of OXCAL Venture Corp., which funds biotech companies. “What will we be looking for?” Birnbaum asked. “A complete management team, led by a charismatic individual that can attract the people he or she needs to get the top-quality scientists out there.” Birnbaum likened the biotech industry now to the early days of the semi-conductor industry. He said the field is about to crack wide open, with applications stretching far from the world of pharmaceuticals to include everything from shirt fibers to construction materials for the mass market. “When I first started in the venture capital business, I made an investment in the semiconductor industry and I was told that the ideas I had for long-term investments were crazy,” Birnbaum said. “Today you’ve got semiconductors in watches, thermostats and toasters , the technology is being used for everything, and biotech has the potential to go through the very same cycle.” “I think the San Fernando Valley is a place that has a lot of what it takes to be the kind of region to incubate these types of companies, but for them to be created, you need entrepreneurs that aspire to the successes of Amgen,” he said. Boyle said, “I look up and down the 101 corridor and that should be beaming with spin-offs from Amgen right now. But it’s going to happen, I’m dedicated to seeing that happen, and there’s simply no reason why it won’t.”

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