Ronald E. Cape, winner of the 2007 Biotechnology Heritage Award, played a pioneering role in launching the biotechnology industry in the early 1970s. Together with Moshe Alafi, physician Peter Farley, Nobel laureate Donald Glaser, and postdoc Calvin Ward, Cape founded Cetus Corporation in 1971 as a “biological engineering” company with the pioneering goal of commercializing molecular biological research. Cetus’s work caught the attention of the pharmaceutical giant Schering-Plough. Cetus in turn saw the industrial potential in producing Schering-Plough’s flagship antibiotic.
Cape’s and Cetus’s success stimulated other scientists and the commercialization of their research. Soon new biotechnology companies, including Genentech, were popping up around the San Francisco Bay Area. Cetus went public in 1981. The yield from its initial public offering set a record as the largest ever.
During the 1980s, Cape led the company into new research areas. Using recombinant DNA and monoclonal antibodies, the company developed interleukin-2 and beta-inferon, successful gene therapies that are still on the market. Cape’s crowning achievement as CEO of Cetus came with the discovery by Cetus employee Kary Mullis of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) method. This work resulted in the only Nobel Prize awarded for a discovery made in the lab of a biotechnology company. Despite these achievements, Cetus suffered a setback when its request for FDA approval of interleukin-2 was denied. In 1991 the company was sold to Chiron.
Ronald Cape himself moved on to the venture capital world. He has played important roles in biotechnology start-ups, including Darwin Molecular Corporation, where he shared the boardroom with Bill Gates and Paul Allen before the company was sold to Chiroscience.
Cape was instrumental in forming the Industrial Biotechnology Association (IBA). Created to represent larger, established companies on Capitol Hill and before regulatory agencies, IBA served to unify the industry and influence sound legislative policy. In 1993 IBA merged with the Association of Biotechnology Companies, which represented emerging companies and universities, to become the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO). BIO now represents over 1,000 companies in a multibillion-dollar business sector.
