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TARGETED GENETICS CORP.
plications than she had imagined. Gleason
benefited from the support of MIT, which
encourages its faculty members to remain
involved in the development of their own
technology, she says.
Given her responsibilities at MIT, Gleason
must play a somewhat limited role in
GVD. The company’s cofounder and president,
Hilton G. Pryce Lewis, who earned a
Ph.D. in Gleason’s MIT lab, runs the company’s
day-to-day operations. That leaves
Gleason free to “ask the bigger questions
and think about the more long-term issues,”
she says.
Like Gleason, BioTools President Rina
K. Dukor cofounded her company to commercialize
a technology that originated
in an academic lab. Studying vibrational
circular dichroism (VCD) as a graduate
student in chemistry at the University of
Illinois, Chicago, she came to appreciate
the technique’s potential use for solving
stereochemical problems, especially in the
pharmaceutical industry. VCD is a measure
of the differential absorption of circularly
polarized infrared radiation by a chiral
molecule, such as a small pharmaceutical
or any biological, including a protein, sugar,
or nucleic acid, Dukor says.
Parker
DOUGLAS LOCKARD
Armour
WHILE LISTENING to lectures on VCD
at a conference, “I realized that everyone
who had worked on the technology was
on the verge of retiring, and if I didn’t
commercialize it, it might never happen,”
Dukor says. She immediately began creating
a business plan for the formation of
BioTools, which she would later cofound
with Laurence A. Nafie, a chemistry professor
at Syracuse University (C&EN,
July 18, 2005, page 32). Today, Jupiter,
Fla.-based BioTools sells VCD spectrometers
and provides services related to the
conformational analysis and absolute configuration
of chiral-organic and proteinbased
drugs to pharmaceutical and biotechnology
companies. In the beginning,
“I wanted very much to see this technology
commercialized, knowing that it would
be extremely powerful later on. It was my
calling. It drove me,” Dukor says.
Entrepreneur Pamela R. Contag sees
starting a business as “one way to translate
basic science into an
application I believe
in.” She founded
the first of two companies,
Xenogen in
1995 to pioneer biophotonic
imaging
systems that expedite
drug discovery
and development.
Contag, who has a
Ph.D. in microbiology,
sold the company
to Caliper Life
Sciences in 2006.
In 2005, Contag
founded Cobalt
Technologies, in
Mountain View,
Calif., to develop
biobutanol as a nextgeneration
biofuel.
By combining novel
and patented microbiology, bioprocessing,
and separation technologies, Cobalt aims
to maximize the production of biobutanol,
she says.
As Cobalt’s president and chief executive
officer, “I generally invent and develop
technology and then take on investors
who ultimately direct the company. I put
all my energy into the demonstration of
the technology and business model,” she
says. For Contag, “Entrepreneurial spirit
has to do with necessity,” she says. “The
job needed to be done, and I
was in the right place at the
right time.”
Serendipity also played a
part in H. Stewart Parker’s
move to found Targeted
Genetics, a publicly traded
Seattle biotechnology
company spun off from Immunex
in 1992 to develop
gene-based treatments
for acquired and inherited
disease. But there was more
behind her decision to
found Targeted Genetics,
says the firm’s president
COURTESY OF J. CHEN
and CEO. “I was very passionate about the
work, which is a requirement for anyone
founding a company,” she says.
As one of Immunex’ first employees
in 1981, Parker remembers that she “really
loved the early days at the company
when we were so excited about taking
on these new opportunities and curing
so many diseases.” She had also learned
that her strengths
lie “in looking at a
scenario that is early
and unformed and
making order out of
it.” When she was
considering the offer
to head Targeted Genetics,
she knew that
GROUND-BREAKING
Chen started a
pharma consulting
firm to avoid
relocating her
family, shown here
during a recent
vacation in China
having that role “would restore the passion
I needed to do the job and the passion I felt
for the whole program and for biotech.”
Unlike Parker, other women entrepreneurs
have started businesses to escape
from unsatisfying careers. That was the
case for Rita R. Boggs, CEO of American Research
& Testing, the Gardena, Calif., consulting
company she started 25 years ago. A
former nun, Boggs left the convent in 1973 at
the age of 35 after finishing a Ph.D. in chemistry,
opting to exchange her beloved role of
teacher for a position that might compensate
her for the many years in which she did
not get paid. She accepted industrial positions,
first at Colgate Palmolive’s Research
Center and then at the United States Testing
Co. “Neither was satisfactory to me,” Boggs
says. At a dead end, she followed the sug-
WWW.CEN-ONLINE.ORG 51 NOVEMBER 3, 2008