Thomas Adams Interview – August 4, 1997
JONES: You have a PhD from Riverside in biochemistry. How did you originally get interested in science?
ADAMS: Oh, I don’t know. It seems like I was always interested in science, probably as a kid, you know, the usual stuff, building rockets and that kind of stuff.
JONES: When it was time to go to college, where did you go?
ADAMS: I went to Chico State.
JONES: And your major was?
ADAMS: Chemistry.
JONES: Why did you decide to pursue a PhD in the field?
ADAMS: Oh, I’d spent two summers at the University of California at Davis, on an NIH undergraduate traineeship in the biochemistry department, and so, you know, that was a good experience working with the graduate students and the various faculty members over there, and I decided that I was going to go to graduate school.
JONES: And why did you pick Riverside?
ADAMS: Well, I was thinking about going to Davis, and then I met folks down at Riverside and I thought that that would be a good place to go.
JONES: Did you go there to work with somebody in particular? Well, kind of. I mean, I ended up working with Tony Norman.
JONES: And what did you work on while you were there?
ADAMS: My dissertation was on vitamin D mediated calcium transport. What it was the entire Norman laboratory was working on the mechanism, the action, of vitamin D, so, you know, vitamin D is really a hormone, it initiated all sorts of events associated with calcium metabolism and my project was really to look at kind of the mechanism of calcium transport that’s induced by vitamin D in the small intestine.
JONES: While you were doing the PhD, did you have in mind that you would follow a typical academic career track?
ADAMS: No, I didn’t. I thought I wanted to work in industry.
JONES: What was the atmosphere like in the department at Riverside? Were a lot of people then going to industry rather than academic careers?
ADAMS: I was about the first one to go into industry.
JONES: How did the people at Riverside feel about that? Did they encourage you to do that?
ADAMS: Well, I mean, there’s always that discussion, but I thought that they were pretty balanced in their point of view.
JONES: Was Norman involved with industry at all?
ADAMS: Yeah, he was a consultant to industry, and he had a lot of friends that worked in industry, so he knew a lot about it.
JONES: So, when you decided that you wanted to do that, did he help you line up a first job?
ADAMS: Yeah, he actually introduced me to some people, but I ended up interviewing at the DuPont Company, and I decided that that looked liked a real interesting opportunity.
JONES: And what was it about DuPont that was attractive?
ADAMS: Well, they were involved in, it was a small group of people, about fifty scientists and engineers that were working on development of a new automated clinical analyzer system and disposable test packs, and they were looking for people that had kind of a broad- based background, which I fit pretty well into, and you know, it was a very exciting group of people, so I went from Riverside to the DuPont Company.
JONES: Did you have other opportunities at the time that you considered?
ADAMS: Yeah, I also seriously considered a job at what was then SmithKline & French in Philadelphia. They were developing a drug for ulcers, and that was the program that they wanted me to work on.
JONES: But you went to DuPont and this was an instrument project?
ADAMS: An instrument reagent system, so it was, you know, enzymes and substrates, that kind of thing, fairly conventional clinical chemistry, but it had to be adapted, and we actually ended up having to invent certain chemistries that would do it, so I invented several different assays while I was there.
JONES: Are these patented?
ADAMS: Yeah.
JONES: And how long were you there working on this project?
ADAMS: I was there for four years.
JONES: The whole time working on this particular program?
ADAMS: Right.
JONES: And did you go from there to Hyland?
ADAMS: Yeah.
JONES: What were the circumstances surrounding that?
ADAMS: Well, they were looking for somebody to head up a diagnostics group in Costa Mesa that, again, had a pretty broad background, so I decided that I’d do that.
JONES: Did they contact you?
ADAMS: Yeah, headhunters.
JONES: And what convinced you to make the move?
ADAMS: Oh, it was a situation where I thought I could do something. I think I left DuPont, DuPont is a fine company, but if you’re there and you’re a young person, as I was, you look around and you see that it’s a very ordered situation in terms of advancement, that sort of thing. I was a senior research chemist and group leader by the time I left, and I thought that I could eventually lead a program like that entire group, probably before I was forty, and I didn’t see it happening there.
JONES: But you did see it at Hyland?
ADAMS: Yes.
JONES: It was a smaller place?
ADAMS: Sure. It was a division of a company of a big company, but it had it’s own P&L [profit and loss statement] and...
JONES: What about the people at Hyland? Certainly that must have played some part in your decision. You thought they had good people?
ADAMS: Yeah, I think, well Baxter, Baxter-Hyland, you know, they’re a real powerhouse in healthcare, and if you know much about this thing here, you know that lots of us went through Baxter once upon a time, in fact, the entire biotech, there’s a similar geneaology that’s been established for Baxter.
JONES: Do you know who did that?
ADAMS: Not just offhand, but you could just go right down the list of companies that were founded by former Baxter people and it’s a big group. In fact, somewhere around here I’ve got a directory, we had a reunion in ‘89 of Baxter people, of people who had gone through Baxter and went on to different medical companies.
JONES: Was Ted Greene there at the time?
ADAMS: Yeah, Ted was at Hyland. He was the Director of Planning.
JONES: What year was this?
ADAMS: I went there in ‘73 and left in ‘79.
JONES: And what kind of work were you doing there precisely?
ADAMS: I was Director of Chemistry Research, so we were developing diagnostic tests and new biological quality control materials.
JONES: I’ve heard Ted Greene speak about a product that you worked closely together on. You were doing the technical end and he was involved in the marketing, do you recall, were there one or more of these products?
ADAMS: Yeah, Ted and I worked pretty closely together.
JONES: Was David Kabakoff there?
ADAMS: Yeah, well, I hired David in ‘75.
JONES: Were other people there who ended up at Hybritech?
ADAMS: Yeah, Russ Saunders was there, and Bob Peradowski was there, well, you know, my wife, Barbara was there, she was at Hyland, and I’m trying to think who else, I can’t recall.
JONES: So, you were there another three or four years?
ADAMS: I was there six years.
JONES: When you left, was this before Baxter reorganized and moved the division, and I don’t know exactly what happened...
ADAMS: Yeah, I think it was in the beginning of ‘78 that they announced that they were going to move the diagnostics division to Illinois, and so they wanted to know how many people could we, you know, talk into going back there, and I wasn’t one of them. I told them that up front.
JONES: I read a book about Baxter by a guy named Tom Cody, he did a corporate history of Baxter, and he talks about the “Costa Mesa Saturday Night Massacre.” Have you heard that term?
ADAMS: Yeah, well this isn’t the same one we’re talking about. It was earlier. That’s when, I forget the guy’s name now, who was the president, Norm Aiken was the president, and they came out and sacked the entire group.
JONES: You were there at that time?
ADAMS: No, this was prior. It was probably about 1970.
JONES: Did you leave because this was happening, they were going to move it back to Chicago? Was that a big part of your decision to leave Hyland?
ADAMS: Well, it was part of it, but I mean, it just, you know, I had thought that, I’d spent a lot of time in Chicago, because we had a manufacturing plant there, and I knew a lot about it and it wasn’t some place where I wanted to go.
JONES: So you went from there to Technicon. How did that come about?
ADAMS: Again, it was headhunters. I mean, you know, during that entire period of time, people were proposing different things to me, and Technicon was the leader in the diagnostics field and they offered me the job of Vice-President of Chemistry Research and Development, at a quite a bit larger salary and lot more responsibility, so I decided to do that.
JONES: Were they mainly an instrument company, too?
ADAMS: Instrument reagent systems.
JONES: So, you were doing basically the same kind of stuff from the time you started at DuPont?
ADAMS: Yeah.
JONES: Well, the recruiting process of going from Technicon to Hybritech, that took quite a while for them to talk you into coming to San Diego. What was going on at that period of time?
ADAMS: Well, you know, Ted had just started Hybritech and he was calling me all the time and asking me about this and that, and finally started to try to talk me into coming out there. Well, I hadn’t been at Technicon all that long, and my family had just relocated, so I wasn’t really interested at the time, when I first started talking to him.
JONES: Hybritech was just this little start-up, did that have anything to do with, that it might be a risky move?
ADAMS: No, I didn’t think about that so much. Really, I just hadn’t been there that long, and Technicon was a neat company, and I was working for John Whitehead, who was the founder’s son. You know, Jack Whitehead was still there, he was Chairman, and probably one of the smartest guys I’ve ever met in the medical field, and they gave me a lot of responsibility, and I was, at the time, thirty-five, and arguably had the top job in the industry on the R&D side.
JONES: What did it take then to talk you into coming?
ADAMS: Well, it’s kind of funny. There were a couple of things going on. One was I got a call, it was probably in December of ‘79, I got a call from my boss late Friday night, and he said that Jack had decided to sell the company, and Jack Whitehead owned 85% of Technicon, and it was worth, you know, several hundred million dollars. He was in his sixties, I think, and so, there had been rumors flying around for a long time that General Electric, J&J, or Revlon were going to acquire Technicon, so he said they were going to announce it on Monday morning. I said, ‘OK, which company is it?’ And he said, ‘Revlon.’ So, I mentally, right then, left.
JONES: Did Revlon have a reputation?
ADAMS: Not a good one. GE and J&J might have been a different story.
JONES: And you might have considered staying on then?
ADAMS: Yeah, and the thing about it was, I knew that, you know, with Revlon coming in, Jack would be gone, and as it turned out, they acquired Technicon in May of ‘80, and I arrived at Hybritech in April of ‘80, so that’s how long it took at that point.
JONES: So, it wasn’t a matter of Hybritech sweetening the deal?
ADAMS: No, because I took a pretty big salary cut to come out here. Anyway, so that happened, and when Ted called, I listened a little bit closer to what he was doing, that’s what it was. That was an area that I had an interest in, and I thought that with my background and experience, I’d probably be able to help them out.
JONES: Did you talk to other people besides Ted during that period? For instance, a lot of people have told me that Brook Byers or one of the other venture capitalists or board members would get involved.
ADAMS: Yeah, well I interviewed with Brook and Tom Perkins, Dave Anderson at Sutter Hill and his partner.
JONES: Was this after negotiations had really gotten serious?
ADAMS: Yeah, right.
JONES: But before that, it was really just Ted trying to talk you into it?
ADAMS: Yeah.
JONES: Well, Hybritech had just gotten started, there wasn’t much there. What was your impression of the company at the time?
ADAMS: Well, it was Ted and a bunch of scientists. They had some really good people, and what they needed early on was to be able to focus on a product, so that’s what we did.
JONES: When you arrived, they had produced research antibodies, but this was before, I guess IgE was the first test.
ADAMS: Yeah, they had developed the antibodies for IgE already. They were working on an assay based on, it was a two-site immunometric assay that used sepharose as a solid phase. I didn’t believe that that would be commercially successful because it required sensorgation [?], so we changed the development path a little bit by going to a bead in a tube assay, and we developed a method for covalently linking the antibody onto the bead, and the first assay was I125 labeled, so we recruited Russ Saunders who had experience form Nuclear Medical Laboratories, and Bob Wang was already there, so those two guys kind of became the core of the development effort. You know, Gary David continued to do more on a research track, and Joanne Martinis, you know, was the wizard behind all the cell biology.
JONES: Do you recall that this went pretty smoothly, taking the chemistry they had, making these changes, and turning it into a product?
ADAMS: No, I mean, on something like the, we had, you know, big trouble trying to put these antibodies on the beads, but we finally worked it out.
JONES: Russ Saunders and Bob Wang, these were some of the key people involved in making it work?
ADAMS: And Gary David, and obviously Joanne.
JONES: Some people have told me that right before you came, Ted Greene had done some things to prepare, you know, in the beginning it was very loose and science oriented, rather than product oriented, and he tried to make some changes in the organization to sort of prepare the place for you arriving and turning it into an industrial R&D operation. Were there a lot of problems at the time, doing that, organizing the research?
ADAMS: Yeah, well, it wasn’t organized at all when I got there. I mean, these guys called themselves the junior woodchucks, you know, so all the scientists reported to Ted directly, and that was just unworkable, so I put together an organization out of the people that were there, so we turned it into a more professionally run R&D organization.
JONES: How did people respond to that?
ADAMS: I think it went OK?
JONES: You were involved in developing the PSA test?
ADAMS: Yeah, I mean, all those tests that they eventually got on the market, you know, were started in that period of time when I was there, and the one thing that I did notice, in fact, if you read through the things, you’ll find that there wasn’t one research notebook that had been signed and witnessed, so it was in May of that year that we actually signed and witnessed them all, and it turns out that the Federal Court of Appeals ruled that they’d been signed and witnessed contemporaneously, and the reason was, there hadn’t been any professional R&D person there at the beginning, so that turned out to be a very key thing in terms of upholding Hybritech’s patents, so I think, Gary and Ted dreamed this thing up, they were the two inventors of TANDEM, and it was a good assay, and we developed a lot of products based on that.
JONES: As the organization started to grow, you were bringing in scientists and managers, a lot of different people, were you involved in recruiting?
ADAMS: Yeah, a little.
JONES: Where did you go to find people, mainly industry?
ADAMS: We used headhunters and we used our own personal contacts.
JONES: Do you remember some of the key recruitments?
ADAMS: Well, we recruited David Kabakoff, Ted and I did, and we recruited Russ Saunders, again that was a personal contact.
JONES: When you talked to David Kabakoff at Syva, was it hard to get him to come down?
ADAMS: I don’t recall, actually.
JONES: Did you have any problem attracting people, because even though there were products on the market, it was still a small place?
ADAMS: I don’t recall that we had much trouble getting the people we wanted.
JONES: You had the resources you needed to develop these products, that was never a problem?
ADAMS: Well, we were a little short on cash once upon a time, but you know, I think the group of VCs we had there really solved that problem, and Ted was very efficient, he was very good at raising money. He was really able to organize and tell the story very effectively.
JONES: Well, when you initially came on, was the fact that they were backed by Kleiner- Perkins...
ADAMS: That was important.
JONES: And is that something that you would use to recruit people, you know, we’re small, but we’ve got deep pockets?
ADAMS: Yeah.
JONES: Well, you started in the spring of 1980...
ADAMS: And I left in June of ‘84.
JONES: Right, when did start thinking about doing something else?
ADAMS: Well, I mean, it was just kind of the normal course of my job. In ‘83, Gary David introduced me to Dave Kohne. I think we’d actually met earlier than that, but Dave was looking to raise some money, so I went down and took a look at his technology, which was the DNA probe technology that Gen-Probe now has, so I went to Ted, basically, and told him that this DNA probe stuff was something that was very interesting and something that Hybritech ought to get involved in. The company, for one reason or another, decided that they were going to stay in antibodies, so then Howard Birndorf and I asked the Board if it was OK if we made a private investment since the company had turned it out, so we formed Gen-Probe Partners in ‘83, and capitalized it with enough money to keep Kohne running for a year, and we gave him some technical milestones that we wanted him to meet. He met the milestones, so Howard and I had a decision to make. We decided to leave and start Gen-Probe. In the meantime, David Hale had become president and David was always interested in microbiology because that’s where he came from, BBL, and David wanted to make an investment, so actually it turned out that Howard and I left with two million bucks, and a major shareholder in the form of Hybritech.
JONES: But that was a lengthy process, putting that in place. What were some of the issues involved?
ADAMS: Well, we were just going to raise venture money, originally, and then Hybritech decided that they were interested, and so, I don’t remember any of the details any longer.
JONES: Well, your expertise was in immunodiagnostics, when Dave Kohne came to you with this DNA technology, how did you evaluate that?
ADAMS: Yeah, if you look at my background, back from the DuPont days, what I really worked on was, you know, methods of detecting things. So, believe it or not, there is some similarity between antibody-antigen reactions and DNA probe reactions. Both of them are bimolecular, both of them as they were designed required a separation of free from bound, both of them needed sensitive labels, both of them needed low backgrounds and non-specific binding. There’s a great deal of similarity, actually.
JONES: And you were confident that it would work?
ADAMS: I didn’t know, actually. Dave Kohne’s method that he developed was very, well, it was suitable for a research lab, so we knew that we needed a very sensitive label. Stewart Woodhead was a fellow that we’d worked with for quite a while. He was an academic. He had developed this acridimium ester label technology. He had licensed it to Corning for antibodies, and we talked him into licensing it to Gen-Probe for DNA probes.
JONES: That was a key part?
ADAMS: That was a key part of it. Then I licensed the magnetic separation materials from Advanced Magnetics, from Jerry Goldstein, a former Baxter guy.
JONES: This was for later products, though, right?
ADAMS: It’s the basically the basis of all their products today.
JONES: But the first products that Gen-Probe developed...
ADAMS: Was a research product, yeah, that used early stage technology.
JONES: But the first clinical products used that?
ADAMS: No, the first clinical products actually used I125 labeled DNA probes.
JONES: And David Kohne remain involved in developing these products all the way through? There were a number of generations, right? What was his involvement?
ADAMS: He was a chief scientist.
JONES: Let me back a bit to Hybritech. Had you known about monoclonal antibodies before?
ADAMS: Sure.
JONES: Did you think that those would work, that you could make products with them?
ADAMS: Yeah, I did, in fact, actually I knew quite a bit about the immunodiagnostic field because I was in charge of a program at Technicon which was an automated immunochemistry analyzer, and I knew what the limitations of conventional antibodies were, and I thought that, with a good cell biology group, that you could develop monoclonals that had the right specs, and that would turn that business into a giant business, because the availability of the antibodies was always a problem because of the animals.
JONES: Do you remember how you first heard about monoclonals?
ADAMS: No, I don’t. It might have been Ted. I think it was probably Ted.
JONES: When he was telling you about this idea?
ADAMS: Yeah, in fact, I think we were still at Hyland.
JONES: Did he ever try to get Hyland to develop monoclonals?
ADAMS: I don’t know.
JONES: In terms of funding Gen-Probe, was Kleiner-Perkins one of the first places you went?
ADAMS: Yeah, and then after the first round from Hybritech, then we started preparing to go out and raise more money, so obviously Kleiner-Perkins was one of the first that we went to talk to, but we raised money from several different VCs, there was CW Group, Kleiner- Perkins, Fairfield Ventures.
JONES: And you had decided to do this with Howard? You had a lot of confidence in Howard?
ADAMS: Yeah, Howard is a cruise missile when it comes to getting certain things done, yeah.
JONES: You thought that, in the beginning, you, he, and David Kohne would be the basis for a company?
ADAMS: Yeah, we did.
JONES: Well, in recruiting people for Gen-Probe, I know that Bob Wang came eventually to
ADAMS: Gen-Probe...So did Russ Saunders.
JONES: Yeah, what were the circumstances surrounding those transitions from Hybritech?
ADAMS: I don’t know. I think both of them were looking to do something else. They’d been at Hybritech a long time.
JONES: Did they come over very early?
ADAMS: It was probably ‘85, ‘86, something like that. Pretty early.
JONES: When you started Gen-Probe, you had been head of product development at Hybritech and that was the kind of thing that you had been doing at these prior companies, was it an adjustment for you to take this broader role, more overall responsibility, being at the top, basically?
ADAMS: Yeah, it was a big change.
JONES: What kinds of things did you find yourself doing that you hadn’t before?
ADAMS: Well, I had never really been involved in raising money before, so that was new, and I’ve obviously, that was probably the major difference. The rest of it was pretty much the same, because then it was a product development organization, basically. But we recruited some top people, and you know, the products worked.
JONES: Howard left at the end of ‘87, what were the circumstances surrounding that? Why did he decide to leave?
ADAMS: Oh, I don’t know, I think Howard, while he was there, he founded IDEC, and Howard was always looking at other things, and you know, we had some disagreements, and I think he decided that he wanted to do something else?
JONES: Were these disagreements about the direction of the company? Or about his role in the company?
ADAMS: Well, he was in charge of corporate development, and I thought he did a good job, so it wasn’t over that, but we had brought in a new president, Tom Bologna, just before we went public, and you know, it was all over that stuff.
JONES: You were at Hybritech when Hybritech went public. Were you much involved in that?
ADAMS: Not too much.
JONES: So when Gen-Probe went public, obviously, this was the first time you went through that process. What was that like?
ADAMS: Well, I think we were ready to go public. We had gotten ten of the first eleven DNA products cleared by the FDA, and Inc. Magazine named one of our products as one of the Products of the Year, and that kind of stuff, so it had very high visibility, and we were able to attract top-rate investment bankers, you know, Merrill Lynch and Alex Brown were the two firms, and we hired Tom Bologna, and actually, we’d already selected the bankers and everything else, and basically took him on the roadshow.
JONES: Where did he come from?
ADAMS: He came from BD, and we had had a search out looking for people.
JONES: And you were impressed with him and got along with him? Yeah, I think he’s a very qualified guy.
JONES: Was the stock market crash after the IPO bad for Gen-Probe?
ADAMS: Yeah, it was. Because if you think about it, we went public around the 1st of October, and twenty days later or so, then all of a sudden the stock price is cut in half. So, we had a bunch of unhappy investors the entire time. I mean, they were just...the company was doing what it said it was going to do, but everybody looked at their investment as not being very attractive.
JONES: You’d raised a lot of money from 1984 through ‘87, ‘88, do you think you had enough money to develop the products and market them? What were the problems that cropped up in 1988?
ADAMS: Yeah, we were running short on cash, and so, you know, we were in a position where we had to raise money with a pretty ugly stock price, or look for a large corporate partner or an acquisition, or something like that, so we started pursuing all of those paths, actually.
JONES: And Chugai was one?
ADAMS: Chugai had already done a deal with us, so they were one of the parties that we started talking to.
JONES: Did you do other major partnerships?
ADAMS: That was basically the only corporate partner that we had.
JONES: So, it was somewhere around 1988 that started thinking about doing Genta?
ADAMS: Well, we had started a pharmaceutical program at a real low level in ‘87, actually, so sometime in ‘88, Tom Bologna started making noises that he wanted to be made CEO, and it became apparent to me that, well two things, one, he wanted to run the diagnostics business, and we couldn’t afford to pursue a pharmaceutical program, because we were short on cash, and so I asked the Board if, I told them that I would prepare a plan to spin out the antisense end of it. And the Board went along it, and I made that decision to go with it.
JONES: But Gen-Probe hadn’t licensed the Johns Hopkins technology, is that right?
ADAMS: Right.
JONES: How did you meet those guys?
ADAMS: Actually, we ran across a patent that had been filed, and Howard Birndorf called Paul T’sao.
JONES: So they filed it, but nobody else had picked it up?
ADAMS: No.
JONES: And you thought that there was potential for antisense technology?
ADAMS: Yes.
JONES: Was Genta one of the first companies? Was anybody else doing it?
ADAMS: Well, Stanley Crooke was involved in starting a company, and in fact, we sat down and talked, actually, but we were one of the first.
JONES: Well, putting Genta together, did those guys come from Hopkins to work with Genta?
ADAMS: No, they stayed at Hopkins.
JONES: so where did you find people to work on this?
ADAMS: Well, we started looking high and low, basically. Because we were spinning it out, Gen- Probe agreed that we could take a certain number of people, and so we started with a core technical group. Mark Reynolds, Lyle Arnold, and some other folks, and then we recruited the rest of them. And so in the process of deciding whether this thing could be spun out, one of the criteria was whether it could be funded or not, so we brought somebody in to evaluate it, which was Jim Blair from Domain. And he agreed to evaluate it with the proviso that if he liked it, he could put the money in, so he did, I think probably a million bucks, and Gen-Probe put up a million bucks, and we spun it out.
JONES: And who then subsequently came in?
ADAMS: The first full round, then, was led by IVP, Sam Colella, and Kleiner-Perkins came in, U.S. Ventures, Asset Management, also a Hybritech investor.
JONES: Was this Pitch Johnson?
ADAMS: Yeah, Pitch Johnson.
JONES: Was Brook Byers involved, or was it somebody else?
ADAMS: No, Brook was involved, and Brentwood Associates.
JONES: So, with Genta, then, you signed some important partnership agreements?
ADAMS: Well, P&G, early on, then with Wyeth-Ayerst, so all in all, we raised, you know, around a hundred million bucks.
JONES: But that wasn’t enough in the end?
ADAMS: Well, you know what it was, in ‘93, we were doing a financing in ‘93, and it was led by Alex Brown, and we made a choice basically of doing either a preferred round, which is what we did, preferred stock, or stock at a discount, you know, like a 15% discount. We did that round, the preferred round, at like $6.90 a share, and it turned out that that deal structure was just a disaster because it really gave the preferred holders a headlock on the company, and the closer that it came, as we approached that date of mandatory conversion, it made it impossible for us to raise money under any reasonable terms. And it turned out that we had, you know, some of the investors that were in that round were just, they were out to take the company.
JONES: Is that what happened, when you decided to leave?
ADAMS: Well, because of this financing, it was very, very difficult to raise money under any reasonable terms and we were short on cash, and we were in danger of being delisted by NASDAQ, and we finally located Paramount Capital, the Aries fund, who were willing to put the money up, but we knew that we were probably going to get sued. So, we did the financing, and sure enough, this one group from the preferred sued us, but it turned out that the Delaware Court found that Directors of the company were in the right, that these guys were really basically up to no good.
JONES: Was this for you personally, a stressful period. I mean, I imagine it would be. What was your experience?
ADAMS: Well, I mean, it was a really tough experience. I can tell you that in 1996, we had twenty-five board meetings between July and January, so that’s how much activity was going on at the board level. And yeah, I traveled 300,000 miles in 1996.
JONES: Trying to raise money?
ADAMS: Trying to raise money. So, that was really a tough time.
JONES: Would you say that this worse for you than when Gen-Probe was having problems, just personally?
ADAMS: No comparison.
JONES: You’re here now, you talked to Howard?
ADAMS: Well, Howard’s been talking to me for a long time, trying to get me to come over here.
JONES: To turn what they have here into a product? I don’t really know very much about the technology here, can you give me a brief description?
ADAMS: Sure, it’s a very broad technology platform, which marries the advantages of arrays with either DNA probes or antibody-antigen, or just about any other kind of receptor-ligand kind of reaction you could dream of, and what differentiates Nanogen’s products from other people in the field, are that this is an active array. Affymetrix, which is a public company valued at probably around six hundred million, something like that, has large arrays where they synthesize DNA on a piece of glass, basically, but Nanogen’s technology utilizes the fabrication processes of the semiconductor industry to end up with an active array, so each one of these little 80 micron pads is an active electrical element, so you can bias them either positively or negatively in a tract to repel molecules at each particular address, and so it will be possible to do, you name the number of assays that you want to perform on a certain sample, in order to be able to do panel testing. At Technicon, we used to put together these big instruments that would fill up this room and sold for $300,000 and they’d twenty tests on a single specimen, 150 samples an hour. This will all be done on a chip and you actually need a microscope to see the pads, because they’re only 80 microns or 150, so this will be, it’s kind of the next big step in the diagnostics field. And so, it uses fairly standard semiconductor industry manufacturing technology, at least the front end of it is, the photolithography, the chemical etching, metal deposition, the wire bonding. Then we marry the biological chemistry end of it, which is the DNA synthesis and detection.
JONES: When Howard first told you about this, again, your expertise is not this kind of hardware, what did you think of the idea? Did you think it could work?
ADAMS: Yeah, sure. In a way, electrophoresis is what it is, on a micro-scale, so two or three years ago, he asked me to join the board here, so I did it. I’ve been a consultant, so I decided to put more time into it.
JONES: You’re also on the board at Biosite. What did you think about their idea? I talked to Dick Schneider not too long ago, and he told me that he declined to invest because he didn’t think it could work? But you thought it was a good idea?
ADAMS: Oh yeah, you know those are good guys, and you know, the assay format that they put together, they described it to me, and I looked at it and said, ‘Hey, that’ll work.’ And they’ve been quite successful doing it.
JONES: Have you been involved in any other Hybritech-related companies?
ADAMS: I was consultant to Gensia once upon a time, I was consultant to IDEC once upon a time.
JONES: And these are all connections where people you knew from Hybritech came to you and said, ‘Hey, can you help out here?’
ADAMS: Yeah, Howard was the one who got me involved with IDEC, and Howard and David Hale got me involved with Gensia.
JONES: Do you have any anecdotes of funny stories about things that have happened over the years?
ADAMS: Well, I remember, when we first at Hybritech, you know, we filed the 510K for IgE, and it was getting to be about the end of the ninety day period, and I was in Washington, in Bethesda, at a meeting, and I called the reveiwer to try to set up an appointment to find out where it stood, Dr. Liddy. So I called and left a message, left a number for him to call me back at the hotel, and I told him I wanted to meet with him. No call back, I called again. No call back, and finally, I called his secretary and I said, ‘Can you tell Dr. Liddy that I’m going to be in his office at one o’clock.’ So, I walked in there and he said, ‘Well, Dr. Adams, I’m just in the process of writing a letter to inform you that we’ve decided to put all monoclonal antibody products in Class III, PMA,’ and I’ll tell you, I almost fell off my chair because that was the end of Hybritech. So, I walked out of there and called Ted, and I said, ‘Ted, we’ve got a giant problem.’ So, anyway, Ted got involved and we hired a Washington law firm, and Tom Hanaloff [?] from the law firm was the guy who set up the meeting for us, and we were able to go in at a pretty high level of the FDA and have this big meeting, and they decided to give us a chance to prove to them that these things could be approved on a 510K, but even in that meeting, they tried to hand us this letter. We were that far from...and Hanaloff pointed out to the guy who tried to hand us this letter at the meeting that, by their own procedures, they couldn’t hand us this letter. It had to go from him to Document Control and be sent to the company. But we were that close. If those products had all been PMAs, then Abbott Laboratories would have rolled over Hybritech and everybody else, but as far as funny stories, I can you give a hundred Ted stories.
END OF INTERVIEW