Cole Owen Interview – July 18, 1997
JONES: Where were you before Hybritech?
OWEN: I was at Johnson & Johnson. I began at Johnson & Johnson in 1971, after leaving active duty in the Navy, and I left in 1980, when I joined Hybritech. I joined Hybritech because I had worked extensively in my last three or four years while I was with J&J, toward identifying and bringing new technologies into the company. One of the emerging technologies that really caught my interest was in the emerging field of biotechnology. I thought there were some things that would really be of value to us at J&J, and which J&J eventually did get to, but it took a while to get J&J's focus to seriously include biotechnology.
JONES: And what years were those? Was this the late ‘70s when you were looking at this?
Owen: ‘77, ‘78, ‘79. About ‘78 or ‘79, I really got interested in what I thought could be the utility, of monoclonal antibodies for us in both diagnostic and therapeutic applications, us being J&J. And, we did begin to get very involved in monoclonal antibodies, it was limited to some very finite applications. The technology wasn’t being investigated in a broad way that I thought could have the greatest utility for us, but later it was. At any rate, as I watched the biotechnology field begin to open up and as I got more and more interested in it, I decided that it was something that I wanted to be involved with. Along the way as one meets industry contacts at trade shows, etc., I met a guy named Bob Byrnes who, at the time was with McGaw Labs, and soon thereafter became the senior business development guy at Genentech. I had also met Robert Swanson, the founder of Genentech and I had had three, or four interviews with them about potentially joining the company.
JONES: To go there?
Owen: I was to the point of literally visiting Genentech to look at houses, because I had made the decision, that if they offered me a job I was going to take it. By that point in our discussions, they had invited my wife and I out to look at houses. I was talking with Bob Swanson during that housing visit, I mean, at that visit. There weren’t a lot of people in the company at the time so Swanson was involved in all the interviews. And, during that visit Bob commented to the effect that my background and what I had been doing, suggested that I might be an even better fit with a new company that the same funding guys who started Genentech were starting down in San Diego. The funding source he was referring to was Kleiner-Perkins, the VC firm. 'You ought to talk to them,’ he suggested. And as soon as I talked to them, my job opportunity suddenly switched from being at Genentech to being at Hybritech. And, I ended up down here rather than up in the Bay Area. So although I joined Hybritech, I actually started talking with Genentech. The transition was logical for me, as suggested by the VC's, because the focus for Hybritech was more specifically relevant to what I had been doing at J&J, since my focus had included monoclonal antibodies for both in vitro diagnostic and for potential therapeutic applications as well. Hybritech was focused exclusively on those two areas, intending to use monoclonal antibody technology as its technology platform. That’s how the transition occurred from Genentech to Hybritech. I talked with Ted Greene and with a good friend who had recently joined Hybritech and I accepted a job with the company.
JONES: Did you get connected with Genentech because they were doing business with J&J?
Owen: No. I had been contacted by a headhunter who was working for McGaw Labs, another California company that was, at the time, part of American Hospital Corporation. [Some years later McGaw became a part of Baxter Healthcare.] I was responsible for certain new products development activities as my responsibility, so I was involved in a lot of different potential new product activities for J&J. This headhunter was looking for someone with new products experience and he just wouldn’t turn loose. He kept bugging me about an opportunity he had in Southern California that actually was with McGaw Labs, located in Orange County. That was what started the process for me, although I ended up getting serious about Genentech, then actually joining Hybritech.
JONES: Was this Hyland?
Owen: : No, it was on the therapeutic side, with McGaw's infusion products. This headhunter, ("executive recruiter") just wouldn’t turn loose. I was traveling to the West Coast regularly anyway, in my work for J&J, because we had done an acquisition of a company in Orange County and I had been involved in helping get those products to market under J&J's banner. Due to the acquisition activities and I was regularly almost next door to McGaw, which I think is how I had become visible to the headhunter. Anyway, this recruiter set up interviews for me at McGaw, which I think was at the time in an old American Hospital Supply facility. The job for which I was to interview was one for which I would have reported to a fellow named Bob Byrnes, whom I had met previously, and who ran the place. Well, between the time that I agreed to an interview and I was next on the West Coast, Bob Byrnes had resigned from McGaw and wasn't there when I showed up for the interview. When I arrived I didn't know he had resigned. I had previously talked with Byrnes a time or two by phone about the job and I was really impressed with him as an individual. After that interview visit to McGaw, when I met other people because Byrnes had resigned, I think I was back in New Jersey at J&J, and the bell rang one day for me. A light came on, and I thought, ‘Wait a minute. Why would I go to work for a company where the guy that impressed me, that I thought I’d like to work with, has made a decision to go somewhere else?’ Somebody had mentioned to me where Byrnes had gone, so I knew he went to Genentech. I also knew that Genentech existed, so I called Bob and I told him what the situation was. I didn't think I would accept the McGaw job offer and my call to him was really just to close the loop as well as to get his perspective on my intent to not accept the McGaw job. He suggested that my next West Coast trip, ‘Why don’t you come up and talk with us before you make a decision, because we’re getting to the point where we’re going to need to expand our business group." At the time he was only person with business experience except for the founder, Bob Swanson, I believe. So, a long comment but that was the way that I ended up at Hybritech [from an interview at McGaw with Byrnes to an interview with him at Genentech and then Bob Swanson's suggestion I should talk with his founding VC's about another company they were starting – which was Hybritech, located in San Diego].
JONES: And when you did come down, who did you interview with? Ted Greene? Others?
Owen:Everybody – at that time most candidates were interviewed by several people. Tom Adams who ran R&D, Ted, another fellow named Paul Rosinack, who was a person that I had known previously who had also worked at J&J, Howard Birndorf, Gary David, Walt Desmond, I mean, there weren’t that many management level people at the company so you talked with most of them.
JONES: Was this ‘83, ‘84?
Owen: No, probably August or September of 1980.
JONES: Oh, ‘80. You were there that early? I didn’t realize that.
Owen: Yes. I predated David Hale and Tim Wollaeger, among others. There were about forty people working at Hybritech at the time I joined, almost all in research. We were located in temporary trailers for admin space, located in one of the parking lots of La Jolla Cancer Research Foundation (now called "The Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute"). Hybritech rented lab space from La Jolla Cancer and the Hybritech's admin offices were in the temporary trailers, with the research labs within the Research facility buildings. When I started working at Hybritech, several of us lived in a condominium that the company had rented. Tom Adams and I, Russ Saunders, and then later, a fellow named Phil Levenson, lived together, before we each moved our respective families to San Diego.
JONES: So when you arrived, what was your title then? Was it business development?
Owen: No, Howard Birndorf was responsible for business development at that time. Later, Howard had moved on from Hybritech to found Gen-Probe. At that time I became VP of Business Development, but when I arrived my focus was marketing. I was Director of Marketing. I wasn’t directing a hell of a lot, as there was no one else in marketing, but marketing was my initial responsibility.
JONES: : And what kind of work were you doing initially?
Owen: Getting products ready to go on the market. We had three or four research use only products already available or at least very near availability. I think the hepatitis product, a monoclonal antibody to a "Hepatitis B" antigen, was already announced. In the next several months we put out, I don’t know, a couple of dozen of research-use products, primarily for use by academic researchers, and then, in June or July-ish of ‘1981, we put out the first in vitro diagnostic for clinical laboratory use that used monoclonal antibodies instead of polyclonal antibodies as the respective antibody reagents. Our first test was an IgE test for use in assessing a patient's allergic response status. So, since "marketing" at the time included all sorts of new product delivery elements, I did a lot of different things. I mean, I think I probably drafted the first package insert for the IgE product. Tom Adams refined it of course, but I think I started the drafting process. I identified at the FDA the individual who would review our monoclonal-based products. We didn’t have a clinical or regulatory group at that point in time, so each of us wore a lot of hats.
JONES: What was it like going from J&J, this huge company, to, you know, this little start up?
Owen: Actually, certainly, there was a big adjustment, but because I had been running new products activities at J&J and I had been involved in new product development activities for literally the last five years that I was at J&J. It wasn’t terribly different at Hybritech in terms of the mechanics of the things that needed to be done. What was different was that we didn’t have the resources at Hybritech that you were accustomed to at J&J, of course, but you had the same kind of needs. Because of J&J’s product management position followed the classic Proctor and Gamble model, or did at that time, that meant that the product manager, whether your title was product manager, product director, or new product director, whatever, you were literally involved everywhere that the product or product line was involved. If there was a shipping problem, it was your problem. If there was a label problem, it was your problem. Packaging breaking during shipping or vials leaking? Your problem. So, unlike many other companies where the title "product manager" means the person many have a very narrow focus and may essentially be the market research analyst for the given product, that wasn’t the case at J&J. You really were responsible for all aspects of the product, and you were involved in all aspects of keeping the product on the market and supporting it. You had to be aware of QC lot releases, the cause of any back order, etc., so at Hybritech the needs with respect to new product delivery activities really were not different to what I was accustomed to doing. The major difference, however, was that at Hybritech you had to go find the resources that you needed. That was different, because at J&J, you would have available the resources. If you had a packaging problem, there was a packaging department. If you had a legal problem, you called the legal department. QC problem? You could get a committee together that knew everything about everything related to QC for pharmaceuticals or devices. At Hybritech we basically didn’t have anybody you didn't see that day around you in either the offices or the labs. So, you relied much more on your experience and your infrastructure of industry contacts and the network of people that you knew, and of course, with outside service vendors such as legal counsel and outside accountants – because we had none of those resources internally.
JONES: Did you utilize outside services for, say, dealing with the regulatory stuff, the FDA, or manufacturing?
Owen: Yes, eventually we did. We used outside legal counsel with the FDA in Washington, for instance, when we could not get a response from the FDA regarding our pending initial product submission. We needed to interact with the FDA in a structured way and they were just non-responsive. We got the excuse we couldn't get a meeting because there were no available conference rooms – across a period of weeks – if you can believe that. And, they would not accept our offer to rent a conference room in a local hotel. We were simply getting no response. At some point later in time, and not much later in time, Ted and Tom went back to Washington to meet with the FDA. Ted had identified legal counsel for advice on FDA matters, one of the highly visible law firms in Washington that specialized in regulatory issues. With that legal firm representing us, we got our meeting. The FDA immediately knew that we were serious and the result was more communication and easier communication – but the cost had been having to acquire some fairly pricey legal counsel. The FDA then put some new ground rules in place regarding the approval process for our particular emerging technology, so then we knew how we needed to respond to the needs and requirements from the FDA side of the discussion. [Keep in mind that at that time no company had submitted a diagnostic product for FDA clearance that utilized monoclonal antibody technology. The FDA hadn't really codified any rules about what needed to be done by someone making application for such a product and the differences, if any, in what they wanted to see regarding product performance as compared to a submission for a product using "old" technology.]
JONES: I’ve heard stories about manufacturing where everybody in the whole company is filling vials and putting caps on.
Owen: Oh yes – it was sometimes an "all hands" evolution. I sat in production lines on Saturdays for Jeanne Dunham, the Director of Manufacturing. Not only was the additional labor needed by Manufacturing, I think that was really important to confirm to the people in manufacturing that they weren’t out there by themselves. When they needed extra pairs of hands, people from R&D, people from Marketing, everybody got on the production line and helped.
JONES: Let’s back up just a little bit. When you first came down to Hybritech, what convinced you to come? Did you perceive a lot of risk in doing this at the time?
Owen: Oh yes, I knew it was a risky career move. When I joined the company, literally just about the same time that I joined, we were approaching the point that we couldn’t make payroll. I had recently been promoted at J&J and I had just been told that I was going to be moved up again, to additional responsibilities. That awareness, that I was to be offered another position at J&J, actually changed the timing of when I moved to Hybritech. At the time I was not anticipating that I was going to make the transition, nor was Hybritech, until probably after the first of the year, sometime in 1981. I actually joined Hybritech in September of ‘80. We (me and Hybritech) were planning for me to join in January or February, and then I was made aware of a pending promotion, which was to occur in the fourth quarter. I didn’t want to accept the promotion and then leave just two or three months later. There had been a lot of turmoil within the company. We had just gotten a new President, for instance, and I was to be reporting to the President. I knew that some of the people I worked with would perceive an exit soon after a promotion to be because either I couldn't get along with him, or I thought he wasn't going to be the person that was needed in that position, or other negative inferences. I didn’t want to accept the promotion and then resign, given the macro circumstances at J&J, so I called Hybritech, told the senior guys what the situation was. I told them that I didn’t want to accept the promotion, but that I didn’t have any rationale to go back and say, ‘Well, I’m not going to take this job offer.’ They understood and the result was I moved earlier than was initially planned from J&J to Hybritech.
JONES: And you were impressed with the company?
Owen: Absolutely. I was highly confident that the technology was going to work.
JONES: Well, what convinced you about that?
Owen: I could have been wrong of course. Personally, I just felt that I knew that it was going to work – that was why I had pushed J&J so hard to put more resources in the emerging biotech area. I thought we were, we, at the time being J&J, were making a mistake not to get into this new area with both feet. I was sure it was going to work. To me, Hybritech looked to be one of the more substantial of the companies getting into biotech from an infrastructure, strategy, money and organizational standpoint. I mean, as thin as we were in headcount, each of the people was very, very competent in his or her respective area. The company had good, quality money behind it. I didn’t know much about venture capitalists at the time, but I could tell that it was a better grade of venture capitalist than the Acme Venture Club, which was where a lot of early biotechnology pure plays were being funded. Of course, I might have been wrong.
JONES: Did any of the venture capitalists get involved in recruiting you?
Owen: I think not in the sense that you’re asking the question, although keep in mind the reason that I ended up moving from Genentech to Hybritech was because it was the same venture capital guys. But, it wasn’t like Brook Byers or one of the other Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers people personally interviewed me at that time. In fact, I don’t think I met Brook personally until after I had made the decision to accept Hybritech's offer. Certainly I knew that he had the respect of not only the Hybritech management, but he also had the respect of the Genentech people, which is where I started my conversation, so I had no cautions about the funding group.
JONES: Well, as the company started to grow and began to put products on the market, were you involved in recruiting, bringing people in?
Owen: Oh yes. It’s hard to recall the details at this point. I don’t know how many people a month we were interviewing but it was a relatively large number for our size, and the approach was to have several people interview each candidate. I had an opportunity to meet and interview our first CFO, Jim Jungwirth, for instance, and many R&D candidates, manufacturing people, and of course, marketing staff. There were three or four or five of us who were routinely involved in the interview circuit. It helped the person making the hire to get a better impression of the candidate. It was sort of a screening and first impression comparison objective among alternate potential candidates. We’d often go to dinner with candidates. I must have gone to dinner twice a week, some weeks, with job candidates. One time it would be somebody from R&D who would ask, ‘Would meet with so and so,’ and the next time it would be someone from manufacturing who would make the same request. And you know, I’d do the same thing. I would have a candidate coming in for a marketing position and I might call Russ Saunders in R&D and ask him to please meet with the person, just to help me get a perspective by getting Russ' impressions of the person. We didn’t have a personnel department or a human resources department so it was a group effort to obtain the most perspective you could from what was often an expensive interview visit – because many – probably most – of these people were being flown in from somewhere else. The employment base in San Diego, at that time, was very thin for experienced biotech or industry resources – keep in mind we were the first biotech company in town.
JONES: During this whole time, the early years, do you remember particular growing pains, particular problems that cropped up that had to be dealt with? I assume the problem with meeting the payroll was a one-time thing, and that other than that there were no serious financial crises.
Owen: Well, that financial crunch wasn’t visible to anyone outside the company, because the checks showed up on time. If you were paying attention, you knew that we had gotten really squeezed in our bank account and that there was some personal money being shuffled around to keep things running, but no one was running around with his or her hair on fire. I think we were each probably most aware, on a daily basis, that we were making consecutive decisions that were going to be critically important regarding achieving our long-term strategic objectives. And, we knew we were having to make the decisions with not very much information. That noted, we had a group of people each of whom were recruited, selected and hired because, to the best of our judgment, these were the best resources that we could get out of the industry or from the given academic specialty. We were pretty conscious, pretty aware of consciously trying to get people from different companies in particular, so that we were getting the advantages of learning how a given problem was solved by that group, or how it had been done in that company. So, if you get to work with a group of people, each of whom has had above average success in his or her prior environment, compared to both the people that they were working with and with whom they were competing with for resources, then you gain a lot of expertise from a lot of difference companies. One result was that there was a lot of pushing and shoving among us to get to an endpoint, because each person had his own, or her own, ideas about how it should be done. However, there was an absolute minimum of the petty, in-house politics sort of stuff. I think we were really fortunate in that way. I don’t remember the politics and in-fighting you see too often in companies ever being a problem at Hybritech in those early days.
JONES:You were in sort of the first wave, I guess, in 1980, the first wave of management. Did things start to change when the second wave came in, David Hale and Tim Wollaeger, you know, a year or two later?
Owen: Well, things were changing, I don’t know if it was because of the wave, or because the organization was both growing in size, with respect to head count, and was just progressing in other ways. We were getting larger in all ways. I’m sure there are social scientists who have described what happens as head count increases.
JONES: Probably not very well.
Owen: From my experience, I'd suggest that there seems to be sort of an organizational personality, a sort of ethnic makeup of a growing company. It's one entity and has that personality when you’re about forty or fifty or sixty people, and then the entity's "personality" changes at a couple of hundred people. I think it changes again at about five hundred people, and I don’t know where the next tipping point is relative to organizational size, maybe it’s a thousand or fifteen hundred employees – maybe it’s at eight hundred employees – probably the lower number. In any case, it’s not a continuum. The "personality" of a company seems to sort of change by notches, at least that’s my perception. It starts to modulate and change at the notches as it hits certain levels which I'd associate with headcount, but there may be a better marker driving the changes. It may be that when you get to a thousand employees that it doesn’t change again after that, I think the initial "personality", which I've now seen in three or four different new companies, is a result of the fact that when you’re small and dynamic, everybody’s wearing a lot of different hats. Everyone is doing a lot of things and no one has time for the petty stuff. There are not enough people to do what needs to be done. I think that is the reason that there is a minimum, if any, in-house politics in those situations. There is also no place to hide – if you aren't helping to pull the wagon, it's obvious who isn't pulling. There is so much more to do than there are people to do it that nobody gives a rat’s ass if you pick up a ball that might be considered to be in their court. If you do something that might otherwise have been deemed to have been in their area, they may very well not care because they didn't have time to do it anyway. So, if you want to do it, have at it. Whereas, if you’re in AT&T or General Motors and you pick up a ball that is in somebody else’s court, they're probably going to get territorial. If somebody had an idea for a product positioning statement or an advertising concept and came to me and said, ‘Here, we ought to do this,’ your response was not likely to be to ignore them. Often you realized the suggestion they made was something you should have been thinking about last week – but you hadn't. Likewise, if you found a new package or saw a new approach to something relevant to our world, the idea could be for use in R&D or on the packaging line, if you told a person in R&D, they weren’t going to look at you like, ‘Oh, you think you’re going to do R&D?’ The response was much more likely to be, ‘Oh, who’s got it? How much does it cost?’ If the R&D person had a problem to solve regarding buffers, you may have just made the job easier – so territoriality was rarely a problem. I think that the smaller the entity, the more the "personality" is collegial rather than territorial. It's just how things go, because each person is so busy, and there’s so much going on, and it’s exciting and it’s also a lot of fun – you just don't worry about the small stuff. At a headcount of a couple of hundred people, I think that it’s about two hundred, maybe less than that, it begins to start to change. Actually Brook Byers at Kleiner Perkins would be a good resource to ask about company personalities because he's worked with so many small companies that have been successful and have then grown to large head counts, going through these growth stages.
JONES: He’s seen a lot of different examples.
Owen: Well, yes. He and I have talked about it a little at various times, and he’s both more articulate than I am and he’s seen a lot of companies go through "personality" transition points. Tom Perkins, actually, might be an even better resource for that question At this point in time everybody talks about Brook as having been our key senior management resource, and while that is true and he certainly deserves that credit, in fact Brook wasn’t our first Board Chair, it was Tom Perkins at the outset of the company. Tom's had even more extensive experience with small, rapidly growing companies. I think as an element of company personality, when you’re twenty or forty people comprising the company, nobody is that far from the senior person, in our case that was of course Ted Greene. You're not very far from the President. He isn't a picture on the wall in a meeting room – you actually know him. It doesn't matter if you are at the back door receiving supplies or in a lab washing glassware, you know the President. He knows you. He knows your name, for whom you work and your job responsibility. There’s a closeness from that standpoint in the small group. At a couple of hundred people, you can’t have that closeness anymore. You start to need a hierarchy, a management infrastructure. One person can’t effectively manage everyone in the building. Most agree that one supervisor can effectively supervise eight or ten people, twelve, maybe. That person has to report to someone who also can't manage more than eight or ten people. You start getting a hierarchy. I don't think you can put it off beyond a hundred people or so – at most a couple of hundred people. If you do so, then you start to see a situation where you have somebody at the top who is trying to micromanage everything and everyone. They end making decisions for the person in the warehouse in the back of the building. A person's supervisor may say, ‘We’re going to use a blue one,’ and then the person he's talking to, who may be the lowest guy on the totem pole, says, ‘No. I talked to Ted yesterday afternoon. We’re going to use a red one.’ And that’s when the system starts to come apart. So, at a couple of hundred people or so, you have to have a structured supervisory structure in place and we began to see that need at Hybritech. By the time you get to about five hundred, there starts to be some real distance between the most senior level person and the people moving boxes in the back. They no longer have the proximity and the access to that senior person. Mechanically, you just can’t do it that way anymore – and that can be very painful to those early employees who have lost that former direct contact they had routinely with the President of the company. It's a cost of growing.
JONES: What were the numbers at Hybritech when different facilities started to be opened, when, for instance, manufacturing moved over to Miramar?
Owen: I’m not sure I can answer that but I can help you find someone who can accurately give you those details.
JONES: It’s not real important.
Owen: I could guess, but it would be just guesses.
JONES: Well, in the beginning there was this real sense of teamwork, a spirit of teamwork, everybody pulling together. How much do you think everybody having a piece of the company contributed to that?
Owen: I think there was a point at which everyone owning stock became important but maybe not at the time you might assume. Ted was superb about being sensitive to that. He made sure that everybody was in the stock option program, and that it was an option program that didn’t cost you anything at the time of joining. I’m not sure that as many people as you might think thought about value at the time they got the option. Probably not as many as you might think. They did after the fact, when all of a sudden there was obvious value, realize it but early on, the process was really driven by Ted. He made sure that every clerical person, every dishwasher, secretary, the receptionist, everybody was in the stock option program. In the first couple of years, it was sort of a moot point if you were in or not. You also have to keep in mind the average age of Hybritech employees in those early years was 28, I think. Twenty-eight year old people don’t think so much about retirement issues or personal capital acquisition. So, yes, while everybody was involved in the stock option program, it was only later that it became important to a lot of employees. It was also valuable to the company "personality" that everyone knew that no one had been left out. But as much of a surprise as it may be, many of the people that joined the company were just out of school as science undergraduates or with grad degrees. They wanted to work in a lab and Hybritech was a good place to do that. It was fun and it was interesting. If you gave them stock, they’d take the job. If you didn’t give them stock, I suspect most of them would still have taken the job as long as the salary was competitive. It is kind of circular argument about how important it was but honestly, I don’t think it was very important to many employees at the beginning. It may have become more important when you got to that couple of hundred employee level. It was also important when people began to realize that nobody had been left out, and that we were all in this together. They could have been left out. A lot of companies do that – still.
JONES: When did you make the transition from marketing to business development and the licensing, that kind of stuff? Was this before or after ICON?
Owen: It was kind of about the same time that ICON begin to emerge. What became ICON was just coming into existence as an R&D project.
JONES: Well then, let’s talk about ICON. Can you tell me about the circumstances surrounding that? I saw that your name is one the patent?
Owen: Well, you’ll hear a lot of stories and get a lot of input about ICON, where it came from, what it was, and the further you get away from Hybritech, the more people you’ll find who will tell you they were closely involved and take credit for it. I’ve come across people who take credit for ICON in some fashion, or for the marketing of ICON, that I’d never heard of – much less met. The way the product format (later called ICON) came into being started pretty simply. I was in one of the labs one day – and I can tell you all of this, but I’m not sure how much of this...
JONES: I’m looking for mundane details.
Owen: I mean, I’m not sure that some of this you may get to write down, because there are still some intellectual property squabbles going on about ICON.
JONES: Oh, sure, well you can review all of that.
Owen: I was in the lab, one of Russ Saunders’ development labs. One of the research scientists, Gunars Valkirs, who is a biophysicist by training, he’s now at Biosite and one of the founders of Biosite. Gunars was literally sitting on the floor between two lab benches, and I think had a piece of two by four and a hammer. He was using something as a die, I think it was a piece of half-inch water pipe. Anyway, Gunars was using his die to cut out round pieces of gauze or nylon from a roll of stock, using his "die cutter." I asked him, ‘Gunars, what the hell are you doing?’ He explained what he was doing, which involved making a filtration-based immunoassay format as one element to accomplish a research objective he had for the given project. He was working on a pretty remote application but it was a very interesting idea and I said, ‘Could you do that with something that somebody cared something about?’ And he said, ‘Like what?’ And I said, ‘Like HCG.’ And, only a few days later, literally days later, using antibody, conjugated HCG antibody and buffer components we already had, Gunars put together an HCG assay using his approach – HCG was used the hormone to determine pregnancy in the lab. He demonstrated that, using his method, in about a fifteen minute time frame he could deliver a very sensitive pregnancy test result that using other methods was taking about two hours to get that same sensitivity level. I almost went through the roof with excitement. This was a very crude first iteration of the assay. I think Gunars was using a 12x75 test tube as the holder for the various reagent components. The test tube had the bottom cut out of it, so it was just a plastic column with his active section on top and he used cigarettes filters that he broke off cigarettes as his adsorbent material. He jammed the cigarette filter up in the tube from the bottom as the absorbent for the test specimen liquid and any excess reagents. At J&J, early on there I had managed the product group that included pregnancy testing products. J&J had been the innovator and had introduced the first immunologic pregnancy test. Before the J&J lab test, the pregnancy test method was a biological test using live frogs – which were kept in a tray in the lab refrigerator. I knew the history of the pregnancy testing market, its transitions, competitive characteristics, etc., really, really well. I almost jumped out of my skin when I saw what Gunars had accomplished. I immediately started lobbying for us to develop that test format, initially for pregnancy testing. There was discussion about the opportunities and the development project really started almost immediately. It wasn’t a funded research project at first, more a "bootleg" R&D project, but it started. Another piece of relevant history, prior to my time in the Navy I had worked for Celanese Fibers Corporation, which is now a part of Hoechst, but at the time was an independent synthetic fibers production company, I’m an engineer by training, and I had I worked as an industrial engineer in one of the Celanese production facilities, where among other things we had made a synthetic fiber called "cigarette filter tow" which was the raw material used to make cigarette filters. So, when I saw what Gunars was doing, I learned he still had a lot of questions about what materials to use as various components to comprise what became the ICON device. Where could we get the right absorbents, what choices were available, etc.? This was a foreign area to us – no one had used that format for an immunoassay and none of the basic questions about materials had been investigated. So, when we started looking at those sorts of questions, I knew from my Celanese experience that we could buy a fifty-five gallon drum of filter tow if we wanted it, we didn't have to break the ends off of cigarettes. I called a couple of guys at Celanese, and got from them other references to other guys elsewhere making similar materials and we began to get some good perspective on our available choices. My suggestions were very early regarding materials – Gunars and his team figured out what was needed – we never used any of the Celanese materials and moved quickly to other, better materials than the stuff from which cigarette filters were made. Anyway, we started the process of getting a broader look at what the bits and pieces were that we would need. It was a fun time and in a very short period of time, Gunars and company had a prototype product. I may be wrong on this, but I think that it was within about five or six months after I had first asked Gunars what he was doing to us having a very, very nicely functional prototype assay. In another six months or so we were ready to file with the FDA and in another six or eight months, maybe it was a year, we had a forty percent market share of the pregnancy testing business in the U.S. And, as importantly, we had those sales at a dollar a test price premium to the pricing of the old format pregnancy tests. The price for the old format tests was only a dollar, sometimes even less, so we were really priced much higher than any other rapid test on the market. Customers loved it. ICON probably represents as significant a procedural transition for a test in the clinical lab as had occurred in immunoassays. The TANDEM transition was probably more important from an R&D innovation perspective, and TANDEM also provided the basic immunology tools required for the ICON innovation, but as to day-to-day use in the lab, customers will probably tell you the ICON was just as important to them. Back to your original question, I moved to be the VP of business development prior to the launch of ICON, although I was still going to ICON project team meetings as a marketing resource, even after I was running business development. Kim Blickenstaff, who’s now the CEO at Biosite (Gunars is there, as well) became the key marketing person for ICON and deserves credit for getting it on the market and its market success. Kim had moved from Hybritech's finance group into marketing. He picked up the marketing reigns first as the project manager, then the marketing manager. David Hale had joined Hybritech by that point in time and was Executive V/P. I think David got tired of me beating on his door every other day telling him that ICON this was going to be the most important thing we did in the market that next year. It was.
JONES: Did you have to work to convince David Hale and others?
Owen: I think it wasn’t so much that David didn’t hear me or that he disagreed, or that Ted or Tom Adams didn’t hear me or disagreed. There was just so much going on already in R&D. Everyone's plate was already full – and this was to be a major new development obligation if we took it on. There were a lot of alligators already in the pond. We had products on the market at that point and we had to support them and keep them working. We couldn’t just stop support of the in-process products, and the ones already on the market, to work on ICON. But at any rate, somewhere along the line, we made enough noise that Tim Wollaeger, who was by then our CFO, was made the senior project team leader in order to get this new format developed and out the door. Somewhere along the way I think David told me it had become apparent that it was obvious we were going to do it anyway, so he might as well make it an official and "load" the research project. Tim picked up the reigns and very effectively managed the project process. Kim Blickenstaff started looking at the format from the perspective of, OK, we know we can do this, so what else can we do with it? By that time, I had moved to business development full time and was less and less involved with ICON. I was doing technology licensing, both in and out, for our innovations and/or for new inventions/innovations we wanted to bring in house.
JONES: Did you license the ICON assay?
Owen: Well, we didn’t license it for other lab-based human health care applications. We did license the format to a company called Agritech Systems, which is now IDEXX, a veterinary products company, limited to vet market applications. Agritech started about the time we started, but with a different market focus. David Shaw was the President and Irwin Workman ran R&D. Irwin was out of Abbott. They licensed the ICON format for veterinary applications, and they did very well with it. We got real close to a licensing agreement with TAMBrands for the ICON format for what would have been probably the first over the counter pregnancy test. We ended up not doing a deal with them. They instead bought a small company in Boston, I think, and went in another direction to get a pregnancy test. We later did a license with Unilever ("Lever Brothers") for use of some of our antibody technology in an over-the-counter pregnancy test that they marketed. In business development I continued to be concerned with ICON licensing opportunities but there were a lot of other things, as well. We were still in-licensing monoclonal antibodies (cell lines) from academic investigators, for instance. We were acquiring technologies that we needed, as well as out licensing our own inventions and innovations. It was at about that time I started making fairly regular trips to China. China has some huge medical facilities that specialize in particular diseases and pathologies and exist on a scale just not seen elsewhere. Different cities were organized with different responsibilities for research and treatment of certain cancers and/or infectious diseases for instance. I think the city of Wuhan was responsible for hepatitis research, for instance. Shanghai may have had a breast cancer focus. Shenyang had another solid tumor cancer focus, maybe prostate cancer. The result was that you could identify cities in China where there were one-thousand bed cancer hospitals, one thousand patient beds and every patient had the particular cancer type. Every patient with the subject pathology. We don’t have very many one thousand bed hospitals in the United States to begin with – and none that specialize in a single disease or pathology. So, China represented a rich resource with respect to research and clinical activities of interest to us and, of course, represented a very large, rapidly growing potential market opportunity.
JONES: Did much ever come of that, did you make deals with the Chinese?
Owen: No, we had identified some very interesting opportunities and had good discussions underway but those discussions got serious about the same time that Eli Lilly began to talk seriously with Hybritech, initially about a proprietary research project for them and then later, about acquiring the company. In fact, the last trip I made to China, maybe not the last one, but one of the last ones, the Hybritech/Lilly discussions were far enough along that I actually spent time in Beijing with the Lilly's guy in China, an Expat who lived full time in Beijing. I didn't know he was there during my initial trips, and didn't talk with him my first few visits. I think it was my next to last visit when we met, and by the last visit we were spending more and more time together. And then, the Lilly acquisition occurred. I left Hybritech soon after that. Opportunities for Hybritech in China were not nearly as interesting to Lilly as were the China opportunities to Hybritech. I think the China focus lost attention and I don’t think a deal was done, or more correctly, if so, I didn’t make a deal. Ron Taylor, who was V/P Operations, picked up the China discussions, as I recall.
JONES: Did you know about the Lilly sale before it happened? How close were you to those negotiations and what was going on there? Well, maybe I should ask you first, what other significant licensing deals did you make? Do any stand out as particularly important to the company at the time?
Owen: Well, Howard Birndorf, who was my predecessor in business development, started the process of licensing the raw materials that we used for PSA, Prostate Specific Antigen, the basis for PSA testing that has become routine prostate screening for men of fifty years of age or older. The basic purified PSA material, needed to make antibody, was first purified and identified by an investigator at Roswell Park, in New York. Howard initiated that contact and passed it off to me and I completed the agreement. There were several licenses with academic researchers done for either key purified materials, such as PSA, or for a cell line making a monoclonal antibody (or several monoclonals) that were of interest for either a potential imaging agent or for an in vitro diagnostic product. I remember one of the licenses that seemed to take forever, was for materials that came out of the Ludwig Institute in Germany. We also had very interesting negotiations with Roche toward a cross-licensing agreement for technology for which Roche had patents issued in Europe but not the U.S., and Hybritech had similar inventions patented in the U.S., but not in Europe. Those were very interesting negotiations.
JONES: What were the problems there? These were research institutes?
Owen: Yes, primarily research coming from academic institutions. It’s been a long time. There was chelating technology out of the University of California, Davis, I think. There was conjugation and chelation technology that Hybritech developed further and then we later licensed to IDEC, which became an important basis for the original founding of IDEC. We did a development agreement for reagent development with a diagnostic instruments company in Japan, Tosoh. We of course did several "research and development" partnerships with various large pharmaceutical companies – those all prior to the Lilly acquisition, of course. We did a product distribution deal in Japan with Mitsubishi.
JONES: What about the Lilly sale, how close were you to those negotiations? Did you know what was going on?
Owen: I knew we were in negotiations and I was one of the "resource" people included in the "diligence" discussions by Lilly, as that company kicked the Hybritech tires and gathered information. The Lilly transaction (actually it was called a merger, not an acquisition) was kind of like what I mentioned regarding ICON. You can find a lot of people who insert themselves into that transaction, as if they were critical to it. Every rooster that crows takes credit for the sunrise. There are a lot of roosters around trying to take credit for the Lilly deal. Ted was the person who did that Lilly deal, in my opinion if you want a singular name. Anyone else who pretends to have driven it or kept it alive or kept it at the table may have an enthusiastic memory. Certainly a lot of people were involved and had something to do with the transaction coming to fruition, but Ted was the driver. Tim Wollaeger was also involved in a very important way. David Hale, as well. Dennis Carlo. Larry Respess, Hybritech's General Counsel, and outside counsel, a fellow named Tom Sparks, were both very important to the process and to getting to the successful transaction. But I think that the person who really deserves the most credit for the structure, the arrangement, and getting to the end point, was Ted. There was a lot of discussion, and some disagreement on the Hybritech side, internally, I don’t know how many people will tell you about this.
JONES: In management, or at the Board level?
Owen: Yes and yes, opinions about whether we should do the deal, was it too soon? Were we still growing too fast in value to do a deal "now"? The reality was that Hybritech was going to need more cash from 'outside' at that point in time. Our rate of growth, and rate of growth of revenues from sales, as rapidly as it was increasing – was not as fast as our expense growth. We were beginning to move forward rapidly in some in vivo diagnostic imaging agents and potential therapeutic applications. Those projects and associated clinical investigations were going to suck up money faster than the rising sales could support. It was clear that we had to have more money. We were at a point where we had to do another financing in some fashion or we had to be acquired. There were some individuals, both management and Board level, who were not so sure that we should sell to Lilly at that time because they felt that the value was only going to go higher. The value that was being discussed initially was less than they felt would be the future opportunity. And, the value that Lilly paid was not the amount being discussed at the time.
JONES: It was lower?
Owen: Yes, it was less. And again, Ted (with Tim's assistance) was primarily the person who got the number up, in my opinion. There were activities on a parallel track for me, personally, at that same point in time. David Hale was diligently trying to get me to move to Europe to move into responsibility for Hybritech's European operations. There was a perception that the European operations might benefit from more close management than was occurring. David asked me to go and I was very seriously considering it. I went over there a couple of times with that anticipation that I was going to relocate to Hybritech Europe, which was located in Belgium. My wife went with me, we looked at places to live, and we looked at schools for our kids. This must have been happening in ‘85, maybe as late as early ‘86. As I thought about Europe, and as Lilly discussions continued, it became more and more evident to me that there was a probability that Lilly might buy us. And, there were a couple of things relative to the European operation about which David and I couldn’t get in sync. We weren't in full agreement in how certain authority and associated responsibility issues would be sorted out.
JONES: With the guys that were already there?
Owen: That was part of it, but there were just a lot of issues. It’s tough for an expatriate to go into those kinds of situations. I had a really good friend who was a very senior person at 3M. He was in my wedding, I had known him for a long, long time and at the time he ran the European operations for 3M, also located in Belgium. So, I spent a lot of time with him, and I felt I had a really good handle on how the dynamics were going to work for someone arriving from the U.S. I was trying to get some things in place regarding authority and responsibility that I thought would be the best way to manage the dynamics. We were neophytes at that sort of stuff at Hybritech. We were neophytes and I felt that I had gotten some very good insight from people with relevant experience in similar situations. Each of people I knew in similar settings, including the 3M friend and some friends from years earlier at J&J, people with "on the ground" international experience, said, ‘Yeah, this is what is going to happen.’ The gist of the opinions were that one had to immediately deal with certain issues or you would never get them sorted out – and, you'll be miserable in the job. It was going to be difficult to take some of the actions that I thought needed to be taken. As importantly, I realized that Lilly was probably going to acquire Hybritech. I would exit prior to the sale and then really not know anyone running the company when it was time for me to come home. I was concerned that I would go from having been one of the early people at Hybritech to a standing outside, knocking on the door, saying, ‘Hello? I’ve been three years or five years, can I come home?’ And somebody on the other side of the door was likely to say, ‘Cole who?’ And I decided I’m not going to run that risk so I decided I wasn’t going to go. I remember sitting at dinner with David and his wife, Linda, and my wife, Lynn, and finally turning to Linda, and saying, ‘Please, tell your husband that we are not going to move to Belgium. It’s not going to happen,’ after he had closed me two or three times that night to take the job – and this was the second or third go around on the issue. David is nothing if not persistent – It's why he has been so successful. But, I was concerned that you are either in Rome, or you’re not, and Belgium was not Rome. San Diego was at the time, and as it turned out, San Diego was about to not be Rome anymore, Indianapolis was going to be. And that was, in fact, a big reason that I left Hybritech. I was the only Vice-President that did not sign a non-compete employment agreement. I knew that I was not going to stay as a Lilly employee. I had been involved in acquiring companies for J&J and had seen this movie from the other side of the table. I thought that Hybritech was a great acquisition for Lilly, and that Lilly was a great group to be acquiring us, I didn’t have any problems at all with the transaction. However, I also knew that I would end up sending the goldenrod copy to someone in Indianapolis to ask them if it was OK for me to do something that I’d been doing on my own authority for the last five years and so I said, ‘I’m not going to stay.’ And, I think I was the first person that exited after the acquisition – I know I was the first V/P level person to resign.
JONES: And that’s when the Owen & Associates opportunity came up?
Owen: Yes.
JONES: Well, maybe we can talk about that another time?
Owen: OK.
JONES: You were also involved in the formation of Immune Response, is that right?
Owen: Yes, when it began, Immune Response was another phone line at my office.
JONES: OK, I’d like to talk to you about that.
Owen: So was Cortex Pharmaceuticals, which came out of UC Irvine and was located up in Orange County.
JONES: Cortex? OK, I wondered why Cortex was on this list and what the connection was.
Owen: There’s a custom formulation and packaging operation in town that really came out of Hybritech, by the way, called Bioserv. Do you know that company?
JONES: Yeah, I’ve been over to talk to Jeanne Dunham at Bioserv.
Owen: Do you know about BioStruct?
JONES: No.
Owen: It’s the facility that builds more labs and biotech facilities, certainly in this area, maybe in Southern California, than any other construction company. It was started by the fellow who was the lead carpenter and who outfitted the interiors of each of the Hybritech facilities and built all the lab benches.
JONES: What was his name?
Owen: Bruce Birch, you'll see his trucks all over Mira Mesa and Sorrento Valley.
JONES: And this ad agency company is?
Owen: Mentus is a large "high tech" ad agency here in San Diego. The founder, Guy Iannuzzi, was sort of a successful graphic artist when he relocated to San Diego. He was one of the early outside resources for Hybritech with respect to graphics services. He provided most of the graphics we needed for our slides [at the time, prior to PowerPoint] and later he did most of our early journal adverts and product brochures. He later founded Mentus. They must have fifty people now. Now, Mentus probably does the promotional work for many companies and the annual reports for probably thirty companies. Mentus has become a large operation.
JONES: Have you consulted for a lot of ex-Hybritech people as they started up their companies?
Owen: Yes, fortunately, but I've also worked with a lot of companies that were not founded by ex-Hybritech employees, as well as working for larger, well-established companies.
END OF INTERVIEW