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"Fear is a very, very important factor"
The problem: two scientists in Britain had devised a complex process for manufacturing antibodies, which might ultimately lead to a cure for certain cancers, but nobody was actually making them.
The solution was for someone to finance a business, someone like Howard ("Ted") Greene, 42, who boasts a Harvard M.B.A. and lots of financial connections. But Greene had no idea what he would have to face. "Fear," he says now, "is a very, very important factor in entrepreneurial success."
What the two medical researchers had discovered in 1975 was that if a cancer cell from a mouse is fused with a white blood cell that produces a specific antibody, then the hybrid cell can be cloned indefinitely and the antibodies separated from it. At the least, these monoclonal antibodies could be used for diagnosis of many ills; if proved safe, they might cure them. That all seemed a little remote to Greene, who was a successful marketing executive at Baxter Travenol Laboratories, but it stirred a response in Ivor Royston, an associate professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego, who saw possibilities and began searching for someone to take charge. A venture- capital executive brought him together with Greene.
When Greene became chairman of Hybritech, Inc., in January 1979, it consisted of little more than a name and some rented lab space in La Jolla. "We had a cell biologist, a protein chemist, a secretary and somebody to clean the animal cages," says Greene, "and that was about it. We had $300,000, but it looked like we were going to run dry by August."
In June, after Hybritech's scientists proved they could fuse cells commercially, Greene found three venture-capital firms to invest $1.6 million, which then seemed "an astronomical amount of money." By the end of the year, the scientists produced the world's first commercially manufactured monoclonal antibody, which acted against hepatitis. Licensed just for research, Hybritech sold only $10,000 worth of the first batch, mostly to inquisitive rival labs.
By mid-1980, having grown to 20 employees, the company was going broke again. "We got to the point where our net worth had gone negative," says Greene. "We were borrowing from the bank just to meet our payroll." But Greene thinks those hard times were a blessing. "Our staff has never been as productive as during those days when we had run out of money."
When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave Hybritech clearance in May 1981 for its first commercial product, a diagnostic test for allergies, the firm was still "losing money like crazy." But Greene decided to go public, hoping to sell 2 million shares at $20. In the two months it took to organize the sale, the market plunged; Hybritech sold only 1.2 million shares at $11. "A window was slamming shut," Greene recalls.