Happy 40th Birthday, Genentech
April 8, 2016
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
Happy Birthday, Genentech ! You don’t look a day over twenty. But in fact, the company was founded on April 7, 1976.
In celebration of the company’s anniversary, California Senator Jerry Hill and Assembly member Kevin Mullin introduced a bill to recognize April 7 as Biotechnology Day in the state of California. The bill was sponsored by the California Life Sciences Association and was passed into law the same day.
On April 7, Genentech was officially founded by Herb Boyer, a biochemist at the University of California San Francisco, and Bob Swanson, a venture capitalist with Kleiner & Perkins (now Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers).
Genentech, which is now part of Swiss-based Roche , employs more than 12,000 people in South San Francisco. BioSpace recently cited Genentech as the top life science company to work for based on its work culture and perks.
“At Genentech, we’re dedicated to creating a connected, inspiring culture for more than 14,000 employees who come to work every day to deliver on our mission of helping people with serious diseases,” Nancy Vitale, vice president of human resources at Genentech told BioSpace . “While our company has evolved in the 40 years since our founding, we strive to remain patient-centered, science-driven and people-focused. I believe this clarity of mission, combined with our focus on inclusion and employee wellbeing, attracts the most talented, diverse people and empowers them to do their best work to help our patients.”
Genentech is often considered to be the first modern biotech company. The company was spun out of UCSF and, according to Keith Yamamoto, UCSF vice chancellor of research, speaking at a Life Sciences Foundation panel discussion in 2013, he had supported a proposal to stop the spinout of Boyer’s research because of possible conflicts of interest, and other concerns related to student training. The department voted him down, 7 to 2.
At the same 2013 talk, Boyer said, “I didn’t think I was doing anything out of the ordinary.”
Boyer remembered going to speak to William Rutter, then the chair of UCSF’s biochemistry and biophysics department and saying, “This venture capitalist would like to start a company. Is that going to be a problem. He said, ‘No—in fact I was thinking about starting a company myself.”
Which he did, co-founding Emeryville, Calif.-based Chiron Corp. Chiron was acquired by Swiss-based Novartis in 2006. That was just the beginning of the spread of biotechnology startups, fueled by discoveries in genetic techniques, venture capital and a new line of thinking by universities on technology transfer and relationships with the business world.
Now, according to the California Life Sciences Association, almost 3,000 life science companies generated $130 billion in California and employed about 300,000 people in 2014 alone.
“While I am deeply proud of the impact our industry has had on people with serious diseases, I know our work is far from done,” said Ian Clark, Genentech’s chief executive officer, in a statement yesterday. “I look forward to making even greater progress for patients in the years to come.”