Six years after founding Boston Biomedical Inc. as a way to employ 26 researchers being laid off from ArQule Inc. (Nasdaq: ARQL), Chiang J. Li is moving the company into much bigger offices in Cambridge, Mass. and plans to have 100 employees by the end of the year. Li, formerly head of research at ArQule, told Mass High Tech that when he founded the company in 2007 with a $5 million, eight-month contract from ArQule, he’d already helped found three companies previously. “I was not looking to be an entrepreneur,” he said. Rather, his chief motivation was finding work for his research team at ArQule. While he managed to pay his employees competitive salaries from the start, as president, CEO and chief medical officer, he paid himself just over minimum wage for five straight years, he said. Last March, the company - by then up to 50 employees - was purchased by Dainippon Sumitomo Pharma Co. (DSP), which also owns Marlboro, Mass.-based Sunovion Pharmaceuticals Inc., for $200 million in upfront payments and potentially as much as $2.4 billion in milestone payments. Dainippon and Boston Biomedical previously had a licensing agreement dating back to April 2011 worth up to $115 million. It was then that Li finally gave himself a raise.
