At a monthly meeting in January, Athersys’ director of molecular biology began the session with a slide depicting an F-18 fighter jet at the moment it was about to break the sound barrier.
“When they go supersonic, under the right conditions, there’s this cone that forms around the nose of the aircraft and sort of snaps off as the jet goes through that visual embodiment of the sonic boom,” says Gil Van Bokkelen, CEO of the 6-year-old biomedical technology company. “He presented this picture and he said, ‘When I think about where we’re at, this is what I think of. This is us this year, about to go supersonic.’ And it sort of feels like we’ve done that.”
Winning Ernst & Young LLP’s Entrepreneur Of The Year award in the Biotech category is the finishing touch on a year that has been a blur of recognition for Van Bokkelen and Executive Vice President John Harrington.
“There are several things that I think contributed to getting us to where we are right now,” Van Bokkelen says. “First, you’ve got to have a good idea or good set of ideas to actually develop. I think we’ve been very creative and very willing to think aggressively out of the box.”
That great idea deals with the human genome. Companies around the world are working to map the genetic code in an effort to learn, among other things, how to make better drug therapies. In 1997, Athersys figured out how to create the first synthetic human chromosome. More recently, Harrington invented a process known as Random Activation of Gene Expression. These discoveries have lead to $70 million in venture money, including $47.5 million in private equity financing announced in May.
“We’ve developed a technology that allows us to get to human genes in a way that previously wasn’t possible,” Harrington says. “We found our niche, and our strength going forward is that we can do what is now becoming the focus of the industry. And that is we can produce protein from every human gene.”
After its most recent announcement, Athersys received calls from dozens of businesses interested in the RAGE technology. Companies working in a particular area can suddenly wake up and find that another outfit has patented the gene they were working on. This leaves them with two choices — shutting down or paying costly licensing fees. Athersys’ RAGE technology falls completely outside the conventional intellectual property constraints of patent law.
Of course, a good idea isn’t always enough. Athersys has been able to offer something to its investors that many scientists forget, Van Bokkelen says.
“Typically scientists, in an academic environment, in particular, have no idea how much things cost,” he says. “ I was guilty of that when I was in graduate school. John has always had that incredible knack for not just seeing how things get done, but also understanding what the timelines are and what the costs and risks associated with that whole process are. I think that is extraordinarily valuable. It’s an incredibly rare trait. And the good thing about it is that John has an incredible knack for teaching that to everybody else here in the organization.”
But things haven’t always gone so smoothly for Van Bokkelen and Harrington.
“We basically risked everything to leave California, come out here to Ohio and bootstrap this company under the most difficult circumstances imaginable,” Van Bokkelen says. “We had no venture backed financing when we started the company in ’94. It was basically just the money we had in our own bank accounts. We worked seven days a week. We were living in a crappy little two-bedroom in Shaker (Heights). We realized this is a once in a lifetime opportunity, and we were risking everything to make it a success.”
Both men passed up other opportunities to take the chance with their own company. Harrington even turned down a position in the laboratory of a Nobel laureate. There was no looking back.
“Even if it had failed, I don’t think either one of us would have had any regrets about our willingness to try,” Van Bokkelen says. “We were at that point in life where if we were ever going to take a chance or a risk that was this big, it had to be then.” How to reach: Athersys, (216) 431-9900
Daniel G. Jacobs ([email protected]) is senior editor of SBN.
