Genentech, founding

Recombinant DNA technology would eventually become so omnipresent in discovery research that people would rarely think about it anymore, like Manhattanites going about their jobs oblivious to the technology that made the skyscrapers they work in possible. The license revenues from Boyer s and Cohen s patents would bring over a quarter billion dollars to Stanford. In 1976 the first company to exploit this technology commercially, Genentech, founded by Dr Boyer along with venture capitalist Robert Swanson, would produce revolutionary new medicines, save lives, enrich shareholders, and would eventually come to be seen as a sort of milestone in the history of modern therapeutics. 

Genentech was founded in 1976 by scientist Herbert Boyer and the venture capitalist Robert Swanson. Headquartered in San Francisco, it employs almost 5000 staff worldwide and has 10 protein-based products on the market. These include hGHs (Nutropin, Chapter 11), the anti-body-based products Herceptin and Rituxan (Chapter 13) and the thrombolytic agents Ac-tivase and TNKase (Chapter 12). The company also has 20 or so products in clinical trials. In 2004, it generated some US 4.6 billion in revenues. 

The age of biotechnology started in the USA with the foundation of the first biotech company. Genentech was founded by the renowned biochemist Herbert Boyer and the young visionary venture capitalist Robert Swanson. (Of the... 

Genentech, Inc. was founded in by venture capitalist Robert A. Swanson and biochemist Dr. Heibert W. Boyer. In the early 1970s, Boyer and geneticist Stanley Colien pioneered a new scientific field called recombinant DNA technology. 

Before the advent of genetic engineering, hGH was purified from cadavers pituitary glands, with several drawbacks. It was Genentech, the first biotech company founded in 1976, to clone and express the hGH gene in Escherichia coli, opening the way for the production of biopharmaceuticals through recombinant... 

For inhalation treatment of respiratory diseases, a pharmaceutical DNase I aerosol is on the market. Pulmozyme is a sterile solution for respiratory use at a concentration of 1000 Genentech Units/mL [22]. It contains 1 mg/mL rhDNase, sodium chloride as a tonicity modifier, calcium chloride as a stabilizer, and water for injection. Since deamidation is rapid at high pH and aggregation occurs at low pH, a nearly neutral solution (pH 6.3) is required. It is administered by means of a compressed air-driven nebulizer. Each 2.5-mL single-unit ampule will deliver 2.5 mg of rhDNase to the nebulizer chamber. The efficacy of DNase inhalation therapy largely depends on the aerosol quality and characteristics, which determine the respirable fraction. Significant differences were found between the different aerosol drug-delivery systems [68,81]. 

Rituxan (Rituximab chimeric mAb directed against CD20 antigen found on the surface of B lymphocytes) Genentech/IDEC Pharmaceuticals non-Hodgkin s lymphoma 1997 (US)... 

Genetic engineering is the manipulation of an organism s DNA. In 1976, with venture capitalist Robert Swanson, Herbert Boyer founded a company called Genentech to use recombinant DNA technology to produce medicines. In 1978, the company successfully inserted the human insulin gene into E. coli bacteria and then grew them to produce commercial amounts of insulin. 

Examines the founding and growth of Genentech, Cetus, Biogen, and Genex. 

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