Doug Williams spent more than 20 years working his way up from bench scientist to CEO, and long after reaching the top, a realization hit. What he wanted most was to go back to his true passion—getting his hands dirty in a big and strong R&D organization with potential to create new drugs.
“Having done the CEO thing at ZymoGenetics, what I spent an awful lot of time doing was talking to investors and raising money for the company,” Williams says. “Not that I didn’t enjoy it—I did—but for the next chapter in my career what I truly wanted to do is be back in the day-to-day, doing R&D activities all day, every day.”
Williams, 52, will still talk to investors from time to time, but he will certainly get a chance to ply his science and business acumen on a day-to-day basis as the new head of R&D at Weston, MA-based Biogen Idec (NASDAQ: [[ticker:BIIB]]). The company has grown into the fifth-most valuable organization in the biotech industry, with a $15.9 billion market valuation, ranking it behind Amgen, Gilead Sciences, Celgene, and Genzyme. Much of Biogen Idec’s value is based on its strength as the world’s largest maker of multiple sclerosis drugs. The company runs in the black, generated $4.37 billion in revenue in 2009, and has assembled a talented workforce with 4,275 employees at last count. The R&D budget was about $1.3 billion in 2009.
Despite all that, Biogen hasn’t been able to deliver a new FDA approved product since natalizumab (Tysabri) arrived in 2004. The lack of R&D output has prompted blistering critiques from billionaire investor Carl Icahn, who accused the company in 2009 of suffering from “failed leadership.” Not long after the public attack, R&D chief Cecil Pickett stepped down, and so did CEO James Mullen. Chairman Bill Young, moving on, said the next CEO would likely be a scientist. Sure enough, when CEO George Scangos was introduced, the first thing he said was that R&D had to improve. A few months later, Biogen said it was cutting 650 jobs, closing its San Diego operation, getting rid of cancer and cardiovascular research, and concentrating much of its effort on its core strength of neurology and immunology.
While cuts have already been made, Biogen still needs to start showing more R&D progress if it wants to thrill investors again. Williams, who I have been covering for almost 10 years now dating back to his days as the chief scientist at Seattle-based Immunex, comes to this task with a background that’s clearly relevant to a Biogen that wants to focus on neurology and immunology.
Williams got his Ph.D in physiology, and did a stint on the faculty at Indiana University before he moved to Seattle to join the biotech industry at Immunex in the late ’80s. He carved out his expertise in immunology and autoimmune diseases there, and was the chief scientist at Immunex when it introduced the groundbreaking drug etanercept (Enbrel). That drug is now projected to be the world’s third-best selling pharmaceutical with $8 billion in worldwide sales by 2014, according to Thomson Reuters.
After Immunex got bought by Amgen, Williams moved on to take senior R&D jobs at Seattle Genetics and ZymoGenetics. He was promoted to CEO of ZymoGenetics two years ago.
The experience at the helm of ZymoGenetics was a tumultuous one, where Williams laid off more than one-third of the staff, and made significant cutbacks to a once proud and sprawling ZymoGenetics R&D operation in cancer and autoimmune diseases. To Williams, those were cuts
