Genentech

Robert Swanson and Herbert Boyer founded Genentech in 1976 to turn recombinant DNA into products, and it delivered human insulin, licensed to Eli Lilly, then growth hormone and later Rituxan, Herceptin and Avastin. Roche took majority control in 1990 and bought the remaining shares for $46.8 billion in 2009. Readers get the template for biotech finance, in which a young company licenses its first product to a large partner to fund the second, and they get a working example of research autonomy inside a public company. Sally Smith Hughes wrote the scholarly founding history from oral interviews, and Barry Werth's account of Vertex documents the same discovery-and-funding model as it was lived a decade later.

2 books