Once Roche Holding AG completed its eight-month takeover of Genentech Inc. in March, all eyes were on top of Genentech officials, as close as drug executives can get to rock stardom. Would they stay or would they go?
The most notable exit so far is Susan Desmond-Hellmann, the biotech's chief of product development since 2004 and, before Roche launched its takeover bid last July, considered by many the heir apparent to popular CEO Art Levinson.
The 51-year-old physician, who helped guide some of the world's most successful — not to mention lucrative — drugs through years of clinical tests during her 14 years at Genentech, could have written her own ticket in industry. Instead, she chose academia.
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On Aug. 3 she takes over the chancellor's chair at the University of California, San Francisco, one of the nation's top medical schools and research institutions.
It's a homecoming in several ways. After earning her medical degree from the University of Nevada, Reno, Desmond-Hellmann was an intern at UCSF, then later an assistant professor specializing in blood-borne cancers. She spent time at Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., then joined Genentech as a clinical scientist in 1995. She was born in Napa, Calif., about 90 minutes north of San Francisco.
UCSF has deep cultural, financial and scientific ties to Genentech. The firm's co-founder, Herbert Boyer, had his lab at UCSF when he and Stanford University researcher Stanley Cohen pioneered recombinant DNA, the foundation of modern biotechnology. The company has ongoing research collaborations with school faculty, and the first building to open on the school's new bayside biotech campus was Genentech Hall.
At the grand opening of the school's new cancer research center June 2, Desmond-Hellmann said she is aware of the need to show separation from her former employer. She's no longer a shareholder, and her scientific board seat requires just one meeting a year. And what about the research ties with Genentech? "If I thought I had any conflict on Genentech or otherwise, I'd recuse myself," she says. That extends to any industry-related negotiations, she said, such as two companies vying for a deal with the school. Like many other schools, UCSF looks to industry for funding, such as a recent deal with Pfizer Inc. to provide up to $9 million over three years on research projects.
As chancellor, Desmond-Hellmann will have many other duties, including the never-ending fight for federal funding. UCSF is the second largest recipient of National Institutes of Health money, with $444 million in 2008. More than 85% of that went to the school of medicine. Even if the Obama administration begins a new cycle of NIH budget bumps after several years of flat funding under George W. Bush, UCSF will continue to look to the private sector, says Desmond-Hellmann. "We're seeing not just the breaking down of walls between industry and academia, but walls breaking down within industry and within academia. If you're an independent investigator and you don't have someone in bioinformatics, pathology, genomics, arrays, it doesn't matter if you're academia or in industry. You have to be a team player now, and you have to collaborate."
