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Friday, Mar 29, 2024

Life Beyond Amgen

By THOM SENZEE Contributing Reporter At the beginning of the end of aerospace’s role as this region’s dominant industry, a growing pharmaceutical company in Thousand Oaks was preparing to invade the conscience of healers and investors around the world by introducing the first ever bio-based therapeutic drugs. Thus, for almost two decades, Amgen cast a sweeping shadow on the local business landscape and became the most important driver of the Conejo Valley’s economy. Now, some say belatedly, the so-called “Biotech Corridor” along Interstate 101 near Amgen, is poised to sprout dozens of pioneering new life-sciences firms, with lineages traceable to the Amgen of the early 1980s when the small company set out on a path to the top of the biologically-derived, human-therapeutics business. “It’s inescapable,” says Brent Reinke, a corporate partner at the Westlake Village office of law firm Musick, Peeler and Garrett, and co-founder of The Biotech Forum. “The history of the 101 Biotech Corridor is the history of Amgen.” And the history of Amgen is a classic road trip along the highway of American entrepreneurial ingenuity. Indulging the road trip metaphor a step further puts the Amgen story, as well as that of dozens of other biotech companies, on a stretch of Interstate 101 from Westlake Village to the south and Camarillo to the north. The corridor’s center-point, in terms of activity if not geography, is Thousand Oaks: world headquarters for Amgen. “Amgen is the largest pharmaceutical company in the world,” says Reinke. “And they run themselves like they are a very large corporation. And they are even with Baxter and some others here the anchor of the region.” Applied Molecular Genetics was launched in 1980 with George B. Rathman as its CEO. The company was small, focused on science, and had a fiercely competitive spirit. But what made AMGen (note the single word with multiple capital letters, a branding syntax that took off in the late 1980s and is still popular today, but which the pharmaceutical giant abandoned to become simply Amgen in 1983) special, say early members of the company’s staff, was its focus on a team-oriented, project-driven business model, and a truly entrepreneurial culture. Back in the day “It was a little like coming to the Wild West,” said Robin Campbell. a microbiologist who joined Amgen in 1989 as a marketing manager. “All good ideas were listened to. Everybody assumed there was not only one right way to do something.” That open-mindedness extended from conducting clinical trials and getting FDA approvals, to business affairs and marketing campaigns, says Dr. Campbell, who earned his Ph.D. from Wake Forest University, and was recruited to Amgen from the Swiss firm, Ciba-Geigy. By the time Campbell joined Amgen, the company was in its ninth year, employed 667 people, and was growing quickly,very quickly. In 1980 there were just three Amgen employees. Three years after Campbell came to Amgen there would be thousands. All of the veteran Amgen employees interviewed for this article said the company’s Thousand Oaks headquarters was an “incredibly energized” place to work during late 80s and 90s. The energy kept building. “We kept growing,” Campbell recalls. “George (Rathman) and Gordon (Binder) gave people a lot of authority to drive the process and try some things that were really new. It was a place for intellectual exercises, where you created a group of really dedicated and powerfully incentivized people working with new drugs in new areas where people had never worked before.” Gordon Binder succeeded George Rathman as CEO in 1988. Binder further shepherded the company on a blinding growth track so that by the time his successor, Kevin Sharer, took the reins in 1992 Amgen would mark its first billion-dollar sales year. But the year before that, 1991, Amgen’s ranks of scientist-MBAs had entered a new era of exponential growth. Among the new hires was a top-tier UCLA- and Berkeley-trained engineer with you guessed it, an MBA, who had also served abroad in the U.S. Navy during the Reagan era. “In 1991 I got a call from a headhunter representing Amgen,” recalls Keith Leonard. “I thought, ‘Who are these guys?'” But Leonard soon realized the opportunity he was being offered. “It’s good to be good; sometimes it’s better to be lucky,” Leonard said. Kevin Sharer ran Amgen the “General Electric way,” he adds. “Kevin came from General Electric and brought a kind of GE approach to grooming general managers. I was really lucky I got a chance to have a number of different jobs throughout the company.” Leonard stayed at Amgen through most of 2004, having been launched on what he calls Sharer’s general-management track and working in a “weird sort of array” of positions. “I got to start the business unit called Rheumatology now called Inflammation and do a lot of other startups and turn-arounds within the company,” Leonard said. He also once served as head of IT at Amgen, and also lead Engineering. Robin Campbell and Keith Leonard were part of a corps of high-level Amgen managers who, during the 1990s, so personified the company’s team-oriented operations that some of their legacies live on. Other names that remain legendary at Amgen include Kathy Wiltsey who, like Campbell helped invent the very business of biotech marketing, and Linda Lodge, all of whom still call the region home. They along with their expeditious CEOs were an elite class of industry pioneers who are responsible for building the world’s largest bio-pharmaceutical maker. While they have all left Amgen, and often travel globally (two were unable to be interviewed because they were in the Far East) they still make Thousand Oaks their home, most having become community leaders in the process. Amgen spinoffs After taking Amgen Europe from a $300 million operation to one that earned $1.5 billion at the time of his departure, Keith Leonard founded the world’s first biotech firm focused mainly on developing novel aesthetic therapies. While Leonard says there is little comparison to his last job at Amgen (senior president for European operations), being CEO of Calabasas-based Kythera Biopharmaceuticals, is a little reminiscent of the early days at Amgen, but on a much smaller scale. “Things weren’t always perfect at Amgen,” he says. “There was a lot of stress; things didn’t always go as planned, but the stress was good stress because you knew it was just growing pains.” Kythera is in various stages of development and testing of products, with working names such as “ATX-101” and “ATX-104,” the latter of which, if successful, will make today’s synthetic smile-line fillers look like Silly Putty. ATX-104 will be able to be “fine tuned” using special wavelengths of light. However, it is still in the early research stage. Kythera’s first product, a localized fat-deposit buster, which could have cosmetic and medical applications, is expected to be on the market in the next couple of years. Other biotech companies have sprouted up along the corridor since Amgen. Former Amgen executives have started some, like Kythera. But industry watchers are surprised that few, if any, small biotech companies in the area have been deliberately incubated or nurtured by Amgen. “For some reason with Amgen, their success has not caused many spin-offs,” said Joel Balbien, managing director of Greentech Consulting. Greentech advises CEOs in the private and public sectors about so-called clean-tech best practices and venture funding. “If it had been located in the Silicon Valley or San Diego, that might have been a little different,” Balbien said. He believes it is possible that Los Angeles’ entertainment-business culture, where studio heads jealously guard assets from outside corruption or theft, has affected other local industries including biotech. “But it’s more likely the product of decades of having scientists and executives brought up in the aerospace industry, which used to be number one in the region,” Balbien said. Aerospace once dominated the San Fernando Valley and adjacent regions, and it was an industry that was necessarily very secretive. Nevertheless, a somewhat smaller biotech zone has grown up around Amgen and Baxter Biopharma Solutions. Integrity Biosolution was formed in 2003 in Newbury Park. The Camarillo-based firm’s LyoTip technology has been licensed to Aridis Pharmaceuticals, and since 2006, the company has had Baxter as a partner. The two companies transfer technology and research among cooperative projects. Integrity’s LyoTip product is a cutting-edge stabilizer for vaccines. Also in 2003, a company called Stem Cell Biotherapy opened its doors in Agoura Hills. The firm’s tagline Future Medicine Today sounds as optimistic as its immediate goals are. Those goals include finding viable therapeutic options for entrenched and debilitating diseases such as autism, ALS (commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease), and Parkinson’s. Companies such as Westlake Village’s Trinity Therapeutics, which creates molecular technologies for treating immune-mediated neurological disorders dot the roads adjacent to Interstate 101 all the way up to Camarillo. There you’ll find ChemDepo, specializing in radiochemistry. In fact, unofficial spin-offs of Amgen go all the way into Ventura County and beyond. Dr. Robin Campbell, the former Amgen marketing head, is now CEO of Carpinteria-based Naryx Pharma Inc., which is reformulating existing drugs to better treat upper-respiratory diseases. “Without the anchors like Amgen and Baxter, that have been here for years, other life-science, bio-med, and biotech companies would not have formed along the corridor,” says Bruce Ackerman, CEO of the Economic Alliance of the San Fernando Valley. “They tend to compliment and not compete.” The region Ackerman says he is excited about The Biotech Forum and efforts to grow the region as an international life-sciences center. “We’re not just banging on the drum trying to get people to come here,” he said. “We’re already established and ready to really take off.” Those involved in the current push to further develop biotech along the 101 Corridor say with the recent announcement of Amgen’s first big layoff, which included cutting the jobs of 700 scientists, comes a great opportunity. “We see an incredibly unique opportunity for this region right now because you’ve got all these individuals coming out of Amgen who have all these years of experience and knowledge,” said Reinke. “It’s an amazing brain trust.” Following a model already proven by another group he helped found The Gold Coast Business Forum Reinke and friend John Dilts, created The Biotech Forum as a practical and an intellectual watering hole for nourishing commercial life-sciences entities along the 101 Corridor. In addition to being cofounder of The Biotech Forum, Dilts is president of the Los Angeles chapter of the investor network, Maverick Angels. Kythera’s Leonard is less inclined to grant that a true biotech corridor yet exists along the 101 today. There is some irony in that, given the fact that his definition of biotech is more inclusive than the definitions of some of his peers (learn more about defining biotech in a separate article in this special report). “I think the creation of a true corridor, like they have in San Francisco, would be advantageous to Kythera,” Leonard says. “We really can build a center of innovation like they have in the Bay Area; it would be great to have those companies surrounding us.” In addition to the biopharma firms already surrounding Kythera’s Calabasas offices, there are also device makers, such as Kinamed, located in Camarillo. Kinamed makes implantables and instruments with applications from joint-replacement to neurosurgery. Kinamed may not be a true biotech firm, but is certainly a life-sciences company. When looking at the bigger life-sciences picture, the 101 Corridor is a force to reckon with in terms of attracting the clean, knowledge-based employers political and business leaders covet these days. But there is one problem that will have to be tackled if the 101 Biotech (or Life Sciences) Corridor is to compete with Silicon Valley, or New England, where almost innumerable pharmaceutical and life-sciences firms are now headquartered. “Knowledge-based industries are, by definition, populated by people with advanced degrees,” Joel Balbien says. “Some regions are going to be attractive for their quality of life: less pollution, better schools, less traffic, less crime, better housing.” While northern Los Angeles County does well in most of those areas, there is a housing shortage in the area. “That was a problem Amgen found when it was growing,” Balbien said. “Leaders will have to come up with solutions to the housing shortage if they want those knowledge-based industries.” If the recent demise of a 5,000-home development proposed nearby is any indication of the public’s intolerance for finding a solution that includes more building, the Biotech Corridor’s future may have a wrinkle that refuses to be ironed out.

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