SPEAKER_04

But basic research was sort of the height, and there was a push against anybody trying to commercialize.

So when I started as an assistant professor, so I started as a grad student.

I went to MIT to work with this guy, David Baltimore, who won the Nobel for reverse transcriptase research.

And then I wanted to come straight back to Stanford because I already felt that it was a positive environment for commercialization.

My former boss's mentors, Len and Lee Herzberg, had two of the biggest patents at Stanford.

They had the fluorescence-activated cell sorter and then what are called humanized antibodies, which brought in hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars to Stanford.

And actually, they gave personally most of their own money away.

They kept enough to survive, but then they gave most of the money away and they ran their own lab off of a lot of that money.

So I had learned from them about how to still do basic research but commercialize on the side.

And so I wanted to bring that back, but the department that I came into, the Department of Pharmacology at the time,

I was warned by many professors, don't commercialize that.

And I ignored them and I went and started a company that went public on NASDAQ.

And many of those same professors came back to me years later and sitting in my office asking me how to start a company.

It just was instinctual because I couldn't see the NIH funding what I wanted to do.

So I had developed a way, this will sound scary, but I developed a way to use retroviruses and make libraries of retroviruses to reverse the process of evolution in a way that rather than viruses hurting the cell, I set it up so that viruses would help the cell.

And once they helped the cell, I would figure out what they did.

And so we sold hundreds of millions of dollars of targets that way using retroviral libraries to basically find targets and use some of the benefits of viruses but to our advantage.

Well, I had developed in David's lab, along with this guy, Warren Pear, a means.

It's called the 293T retroviral producer system.

It was a way to make large numbers of these viruses very quickly.