Moreover, as a pioneering company, it was committed to making a profit almost from the start. The strategy ensured its survival but forced it to sign away some of its first meaningful products and to pass up two potential drug targets, now known as Epogen and Neupogen, the two most successful biotech drugs ever, making billions for rival Amgen. Although scores of other biotech companies would follow, Genentech was the first to harness the possibilities of this new technology to bring such products to market. Perhaps even more significantly, Genentech can lay claim to altering the landscape of biomedical science. UCSF scientist Herbert W. Boyer and venture capitalist Robert Swanson were able to persuade some of the best young molecular biologists to work for their company, offering them high salaries and stock options, but also the resources to conduct cutting-edge science and the promise that their findings would be translated into treatments for the ill and the dying.
Investors win That's been good for investors as well.
The company's current chairman and CEO, Arthur D. Levinson, is an accomplished scientist in his own right, a molecular biologist, with scores of papers in top-flight journals. He had been working with Dr. Harold E. Varmus, who later became director of the National Institutes of Health, and Dr. J. Michael Bishop, now chancellor of the university. Levinson recalls that he was on track to become an academic researcher. Levinson said in a recent interview. He would have all the equipment he needed for his research and he could still publish and get outside recognition for his work.