Catching the entrepreneurial bug

Bill Clarke: no regrets.

Four hours later, Clarke was still in the meeting. Within seven months, he had left GE (worldwide staff: 46,000) and joined the start-up (worldwide staff at the time: 5) as chief executive.

Jumping from a big company to a small start-up is always a tough decision – but Clarke’s move from one so large to one so small shows that he must have been convinced that he was on to a winner.

Initially, though, Clarke himself had been deeply sceptical. “My experience had been that people just didn’t really understand what it took to take a molecule and prove that it could be a great diagnostic, a great therapeutic,” he says.

 “I kept asking him questions,” recalls Clarke. “‘Yes,’ I would say, ‘it would be really interesting if you could do experiment X.’ And [Weichert] would quickly go through his slides and say ‘Yes, I did that experiment, and here it is.’ Then I would say, ‘That’s interesting. But what would be really interesting is if you did Y.’ And he would say, ‘Yes, I did that, too, and here are the results.’”

Eighteen months later, Clarke is still there. Cellectar has just completed a second-round financing of $13 million on the back of promising preclinical results that seem to show that its lead compound CLR1404, a phospholipid ether combined with the radiolabel 131 iodine, unfailingly accumulates in tumour cells and equally unfailingly is broken down by healthy cells. With money in the bank, the company about to start clinical trials.

Of course, the multi-million dollar question – does it actually cure cancer? – will only be answered during the trials, which may take a few years. To prepare, staffing has risen to 18.

And, no, Clarke has no regrets – neither about his move, nor about his time in the world of large corporations.

Back in the USA

The irony is that when he walked into Weichert’s office Clarke was not looking for another job. Born and educated in the US as a researcher and physician, he was back working in the US after eight years in the UK. What had started as a one-year secondment from the University of Washington, Seattle, to Glaxo Wellcome in Stevenage turned into a job heading up Glaxo’s biology research. Then, in the shake-up that followed Glaxo’s merger with SmithKline Beecham, Clarke moved to the in vitro diagnostics firm Amersham Biosciences to lead its global R&D – which is where he was when GE bought Amersham.

The posting to Wisconsin followed a perceived need to merge the corporate cultures of Amersham and GE Healthcare. The American company, based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, decided to relocate its global headquarters to Amersham (the only GE division headquartered outside the US), but needed to send someone to the US to bridge the gap at that end. As the ranking American at Amersham, a commuter town 27 miles north west of London,  Clarke was the natural choice.

As a consequence, he now found himself next to one of the best-organised and liveliest spin-out cultures in American academia, the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In retrospect, perhaps GE should have known better than to put so much temptation Clarke’s way.

Tech transfer the Madison way

Clarke is an unashamed admirer of Wisconsin–Madison. “This place is really good,” says Clarke, adding, “It’s got really bright scientists, very bright students.” More than that: “They know how to do licensing of their technology in a very mature way, unlike some of the really big-name universities who believe everything is immediately worth $100 million.”

 “I think the University of Wisconsin and the Madison biotechnology community that surrounds it is just an undiscovered diamond in the rough, and I have worked at some of the best academic universities in the world – and in my various roles at Amersham and GE I have dealt with some of the best in the world,” he says.

One tech-transfer example Clarke gives is TomoTherapy Inc, whose IPO on Nasdaq last year raised over $200 million. “It’s brought an entirely new way of doing radiation therapy,” says Clarke. “It started as three people coming out of the University of Wisconsin about fourteen years ago. It’s now got over three thousand people working in Wisconsin.”

But for all his love of the start-up life, Clarke is no rebel against the corporate world. “I loved working at GE Healthcare. It was very exciting, and it’s a very good company. The people in GE are incredibly bright and energetic.”

So there he was, a little over 50 years old, in a top job, with a wife and two children, both in full-time education: why did he jump? Because, he says, as a small start-up Cellectar gave him the opportunity to do everything he likes doing. After years either training or practising as a physician-scientist, and seeing medicines that he helped develop saving lives, he found himself enticed by “the opportunity to get into a small fast-paced company where there was this continuous hour-by-hour mixture of science and drug development and business”.

Clarke adds that he has the “world’s most forgiving wife” – herself a paediatric nurse practitioner and nursing educator. “That sounds really cool,” she said when told of the opportunity. “You should do that.”

The learning curve

He believes his experience in large corporations has helped him enormously in Cellectar. “I couldn’t do my job if I hadn’t been at GE, at Amersham and GSK. At GE I learned to be a much better, more savvy and analytical business person than I had ever been before. The business people at GE are the best in the world. At Amersham I learned how to run a global R&D operation and develop drugs, and interact with the realities of developing drugs. I also learned about radiopharmaceuticals, which is a very bespoke area of pharmaceutical development.”

And Clarke is full of praise for UK pharmaceutical R&D. “The incredible expertise that exists in the UK around pharmaceutical R&D and manufacturing is just not appreciated as much as it should be,” he says. “Per square centimetre of ground the highest concentration of expertise anywhere in the planet.”

Are there big cultural differences between working for a small start-up and a large corporation? “Absolutely,” says Clarke. “But neither is better. Little companies are in one phase of their development, and big companies are in another phase of their development. They develop cultures appropriate to the mores, interests and business realities they have.”