In Unicorns, Tim Harris provides one of the most complete accounts of biotech history. It might be reasonably analogized to a chronological encyclopedia of firms and technologies that have shaped the industry. Most existing histories provide a depth-first window into the inner workings of biotech, including some of my favorite books of all time [1]. By contrast, Harris takes a breadth-first approach and attempts to cover the span of activity in the industry across the past half-century.
Harris writes not as an outside observer, but as a participant in many of the stories he recounts. The industry is lucky to have an operator of his caliber to reflect on the road that took us to today.
Harris divides his chronology based on a set of epochal technologies that sparked waves of innovation in biotech, roughly broken out as:
The stories in the Recombinant DNA era have largely been covered in other narratives, and Harris intelligently skims through most of the details on the most storied firms — Genentech, Amgen, and Biogen. His survey includes the most comprehensive coverage of Cetus, Genetics Institute, Immunex, and Synergen that I’ve encountered.
Harris’ largest contribution to the existing biotech canon comes in the Monoclonal antibodies and Genomics eras. Perhaps not coincidentally, this is where Harris himself enters the story. He provides the first account of Celltech (UK) that I’ve ever come across, as well as the most complete description of the lost opportunity in the UK’s technology ecosystem that follow the discovery of mAbs (see Questions). Likewise, he provides the only real account of Hybritech I’ve seen outside a last minute allusion in Teitelman’s Gene Dreams.
The most compelling story in the mAb era for me was the description of rituximab/Rituxan’s origins (see Underrated orchestrators). I had naïvely assumed that Rituxan was a homegrown Genentech medicine, and I was quite shocked to realize that in fact it emerged from Idec. Within Idec, it was a backburner side project until the company’s main efforts failed and Brook Byers managed to talk Genentech into a meeting about partnering on the idea of a pan-B cell targeting mAb. This updated my prior on the frequency with which major assets, at even mid-sized biotechs. come from collaboration with small, fragile young firms on the frontiers of the possible.
Harris had a front row seat on the genomics revolution, starting while he led a genetics initiative at Glaxo and later at early genomics firm Sequana and first generation structural genomics firm SGX.
I was struck by how the firms that emerged in this era — Celera, Incyte, Millenium, Myriad, Sequana — carry some echoes of the business model experimentation occurring with techbio firms today. Each of these companies initially tried to built a business outside therapeutics development. There is a joke often repeated in Bay Area biotech circles that goes something like:
You either live long enough to become a therapeutics company, or die trying to sell {tools, targets, predictions}.
I may have even deployed a similar line once or twice myself!
There are actually partial counterexamples from the genomics era where companies managed to succeed modestly by effectively selling targets rather than therapeutic assets. Cellera, deCODE, Incyte, Millenium, and Sequana all initially began by attempting to nominate drug targets from early sequencing data (expressed sequence tags), then sell this information in one form or another.
Two business models emerged: