Adventures in Biotechnology

Ivor Royston

By Jennifer Dionisio

Ivor Royston is no stranger to serendipity. In 1978, having spent several weeks poring over a library book on starting a small business, he was frustrated. He was certain that the monoclonal antibody research he was doing at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), could provide a powerful tool against cancer. If it was possible to create cloned, identical antibodies for cancer-cell specific antigens, these antibodies could be used to detect and possibly treat cancer. But Royston wasn’t sure how to set up a business, scale up the manufacturing process, or create a distribution network. Then his wife, Colette, introduced him to her old friend Brook Byers. Byers was a junior partner with Kleiner Perkins, the venture capital firm that had helped start Genentech, the first Bay Area biotech company and one of Royston’s inspirations for taking his work out of the lab and into the market. “There are a lot of people who are absolutely brilliant that just didn’t have luck,” Royston says of this chance introduction. “I was lucky.”

With Byers’s backing Royston and his research associate, Howard Birndorf, founded Hybritech, one of the first companies to commercialize monoclonal antibodies and the first to market a prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test for prostate cancer. Hybritech began with a $300,000 budget; when it was sold to Eli Lilly after less than a decade of operation, the sale price was a staggering $400 million.

Since selling Hybritech, Royston has heeded a variety of callings; he says he likes to switch his work every ten years or so. After stints as a businessman, a scientist, and an entrepreneur, he now runs Forward Ventures, a venture capital firm that funds fledgling life-science companies. Royston has combined interests since the beginning of his career, studying to become both a researcher and a clinician at Johns Hopkins University before completing a fellowship in internal medicine at Stanford University and fulfilling his draft requirement as a cancer researcher at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland.

Royston brought an important companion with him when he returned to Stanford for an oncology fellowship in 1975: a decommissioned, three-foot-high, liquid nitrogen tank holding hundreds of cell lines that he had accumulated at NIH. The cell lines Royston added from the lab of Nobel laureates César Milstein and Georges Köhler became Hybritech’s startup material.

Royston is chatty and good humored, and his company was celebrated for its innovative, laid-back atmosphere. A former employee of Hybritech described the culture clash that followed Eli Lilly’s buyout as “Animal House meets The Waltons.” Many of the company’s pioneering members left to start new companies, and today almost all of the San Diego area’s major biotech companies connect back to Hybritech. Royston also moved to new business ventures in the area. Even before he sold Hybritech, he had formed IDEC Pharmaceuticals to develop therapeutics that he hoped would cure cancer, not just diagnose it. One of IDEC’s discoveries, Rituxin, treats non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and is now the best-selling cancer drug worldwide.

Despite his involvement with Hybritech and IDEC, Royston continued to serve as a faculty member at UCSD until he left to start the nonprofit San Diego Regional Cancer Center (now the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center) in 1990, convinced that the path of treatments from basic cancer research to patients was too long. The center received a major boost when its preliminary gene-therapy research got the attention of James Hewitt, a former high-ranking government official. Hewitt’s wife, Clemma, a former Miss Iowa and runner-up in the Miss America contest, was dying from brain cancer. He called Royston to ask whether his gene research—then still in animal testing— could provide a possible treatment. Hewitt had astonishingly powerful ties in government, and with his encouragement Royston embarked on a lengthy process to get single-patient approval from the FDA. The press coverage of that process (ABC took footage for a 20/20 program that was never aired) helped establish the center as a major site for cancer research and helped secure an endowment from Sidney Kimmel, founder of the Jones Apparel Group.

Royston’s itchy feet returned in 2000, and he decided to give Forward Ventures, the small venture capital fund that he started in 1993, his full-time attention. Some might find the switch from cancer researcher to financier a stretch, but not Royston. “I really enjoyed taking ideas and treating patients directly, and I also enjoyed the interaction I had with the business world,” he says about his days starting Hybritech. With San Diego now the third largest biotech cluster in the United States (see article on p. 38), Royston’s business acumen is still dead on. From “founding father” to venture capitalist, Royston continues to lead the growth of San Diego’s biotech scene.