Greg Lucier has made the 21st century — the biological century — into a wise business proposition.
In a deal completed Monday, Chief Executive Lucier and his team merged Carlsbad’s Life Technologies with Thermo Fisher, based in Waltham, Mass. Thermo paid $13.6 billion for Life, closer to $16 billion if you count assumed debt, in a deal that highly valued the company’s Ion Torrent genetic sequencing platform as well as Life’s bread-and-butter consumable lab products. The terms also provided Lucier with a $38 million personal exit.
How did he do it — drive up the business of Life from $778 million a year in revenue in 2003 to $3.8 billion in 2012 — and what does he plan to do next?
What’s next sounds like the fun part.
“I’m going to take a little bit of time off, recharge the batteries, do some things I never had a chance to do over the last decade or so, like ride a dirt bike through the desert from San Diego to Cabo San Lucas,” Lucier says. “Ultimately, I want to take a BMW motorcycle through Mongolia. Couple of heli-skiing trips to Alaska and British Columbia. That gets done in the first six months. Then I’m going to give back. I’m going to continue to serve as chairman of the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute.”
Lucier would like to preserve Sanford-Burnham’s “incredible reputation” as a research institute but add more commercial capabilities so that promising drug discoveries would become more attractive to venture capital firms, morph into companies, and get more quickly to patients, as cures. “Make it look more like a biotech company,” he says, speeding bench-to-bedside.
And he will continue on the boards of NuVasive (the medical products company specializing in spinal devices), CareFusion and the private RainTree Oncology.
“The other day, I was in Saudi Arabia,” Lucier reflected from an office filled with moving boxes, “and my youngest daughter FaceTimed me in the middle of the night. Now she didn’t know it was the middle of the night and I couldn’t sleep anyway, but that type of experience would’ve been unheard of 20 years ago.
“That is emblematic of the enormous progress made in 20th-century physical sciences. Our ability to harness the movement of electrons allows you to record this conversation on that iPhone. And it has been transformational in terms of redefining the distances between human beings.
“That same level of transformation is under way here in the 21st century with life sciences. The people on the street don’t see it, don’t feel it yet, and how could they? All they can experience today is what exists, but there’s starting to be some remarkable breakthrough drugs that stop disease — for instance, the new drug that eliminates hepatitis C. I mean, what an amazing breakthrough.
“In the 21st century, our ability to figure out how this remarkable, elegant thing called life works will fundamentally change the human condition again — one more time. I want to be part of that. I’ve been part of that. I’m only 49 years old, so there’s more to go.”
He smiles. “Someday we will be able to read the entire human genome like a zipper, but we are not there yet.”
Applied Biosystems, a company Life merged with some five years ago, was the prime contractor on the first Human Genome Project, and developed the shotgun approach to gene sequencing, Lucier says.
He believes that in 10 years cancer can be turned into “a chronic disease, one that is managed, knowable, not necessarily a death sentence, or a death-sentence postponed,” but more like HIV/AIDS. He believes that “your genetic sequence will be like the 21st-century stethoscope, part of your medical work-up.”
With San Diego’s even-bigger genomics company Illumina, Life Technologies has been a leader in driving the industry toward the $1,000 genome.
“The way we find new drugs, an industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars, is radically changing, and the future belongs to those companies that figure out how to harness the data quicker than anybody.
“We’re going to engineer organs for ourselves in the next decade or two, and I think that will transform the transplant industry and how we deal with heart disease, and it will be incredibly beneficial to the human condition.”
Advice for CEOs present and future?
“One, you have to have an absolute passion about the mission. When I came here, I had a view that we could create a very big science company because the economies of scale mattered. Invitrogen, our previous entity, sold siloed pieces of technology. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to see how one salesperson could sell more, in a lab in Shanghai. You pick up great economies that way. We grew ourselves through organic means and through inorganic, acquiring companies to get that economic advantage.
“Second is that the rules that applied where you were before may not apply to where you are today. I was pretty successful at GE Health, but when I got to Invitrogen and applied GE rules, they weren’t so successful. If CEOs are not adaptable, they fall into that category of not lasting very long in the job.”
He explains, “GE was a little more Darwinian, a little more aggressive. We were removing the bottom 10 to 20 percent of all employees every year. Kind of the Jack Welch way. But I don’t think that approach is appropriate for a science-based collaborative organization. So we were one of the first companies on the S&P to remove performance evaluations. That was unheard of in 2004.
“Third rule for CEOs is to create a purpose to the place so that people come to work pumped up, fired up, ready to push out the noise and absolutely focus on what they are doing to achieve that purpose, which for us was our mission statement: shaping discovery and improving life.
“Bring everybody back to that phraseology all the time. Shaping discovery meant becoming the best partners for researchers around the world. Improving life meant taking our know-how and applying it where it can actually fundamentally change lives in cancer care, in food safety, in forensics using our DNA technology. (Life helped to develop DNA fingerprinting and remains the world’s biggest player in that space, according to Lucier.) So, our mission statement was our strategy and when you have those two line up, it’s a grand slam.”
In a deal completed Monday, Chief Executive Lucier and his team merged Carlsbad’s Life Technologies with Thermo Fisher, based in Waltham, Mass. Thermo paid $13.6 billion for Life, closer to $16 billion if you count assumed debt, in a deal that highly valued the company’s Ion Torrent genetic sequencing platform as well as Life’s bread-and-butter consumable lab products. The terms also provided Lucier with a $38 million personal exit.
How did he do it — drive up the business of Life from $778 million a year in revenue in 2003 to $3.8 billion in 2012 — and what does he plan to do next?
What’s next sounds like the fun part.
“I’m going to take a little bit of time off, recharge the batteries, do some things I never had a chance to do over the last decade or so, like ride a dirt bike through the desert from San Diego to Cabo San Lucas,” Lucier says. “Ultimately, I want to take a BMW motorcycle through Mongolia. Couple of heli-skiing trips to Alaska and British Columbia. That gets done in the first six months. Then I’m going to give back. I’m going to continue to serve as chairman of the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute.”
Lucier would like to preserve Sanford-Burnham’s “incredible reputation” as a research institute but add more commercial capabilities so that promising drug discoveries would become more attractive to venture capital firms, morph into companies, and get more quickly to patients, as cures. “Make it look more like a biotech company,” he says, speeding bench-to-bedside.
And he will continue on the boards of NuVasive (the medical products company specializing in spinal devices), CareFusion and the private RainTree Oncology.
“The other day, I was in Saudi Arabia,” Lucier reflected from an office filled with moving boxes, “and my youngest daughter FaceTimed me in the middle of the night. Now she didn’t know it was the middle of the night and I couldn’t sleep anyway, but that type of experience would’ve been unheard of 20 years ago.
“That is emblematic of the enormous progress made in 20th-century physical sciences. Our ability to harness the movement of electrons allows you to record this conversation on that iPhone. And it has been transformational in terms of redefining the distances between human beings.
“That same level of transformation is under way here in the 21st century with life sciences. The people on the street don’t see it, don’t feel it yet, and how could they? All they can experience today is what exists, but there’s starting to be some remarkable breakthrough drugs that stop disease — for instance, the new drug that eliminates hepatitis C. I mean, what an amazing breakthrough.
“In the 21st century, our ability to figure out how this remarkable, elegant thing called life works will fundamentally change the human condition again — one more time. I want to be part of that. I’ve been part of that. I’m only 49 years old, so there’s more to go.”
He smiles. “Someday we will be able to read the entire human genome like a zipper, but we are not there yet.”
Applied Biosystems, a company Life merged with some five years ago, was the prime contractor on the first Human Genome Project, and developed the shotgun approach to gene sequencing, Lucier says.
He believes that in 10 years cancer can be turned into “a chronic disease, one that is managed, knowable, not necessarily a death sentence, or a death-sentence postponed,” but more like HIV/AIDS. He believes that “your genetic sequence will be like the 21st-century stethoscope, part of your medical work-up.”
With San Diego’s even-bigger genomics company Illumina, Life Technologies has been a leader in driving the industry toward the $1,000 genome.
“The way we find new drugs, an industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars, is radically changing, and the future belongs to those companies that figure out how to harness the data quicker than anybody.
“We’re going to engineer organs for ourselves in the next decade or two, and I think that will transform the transplant industry and how we deal with heart disease, and it will be incredibly beneficial to the human condition.”
Advice for CEOs present and future?
“One, you have to have an absolute passion about the mission. When I came here, I had a view that we could create a very big science company because the economies of scale mattered. Invitrogen, our previous entity, sold siloed pieces of technology. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to see how one salesperson could sell more, in a lab in Shanghai. You pick up great economies that way. We grew ourselves through organic means and through inorganic, acquiring companies to get that economic advantage.
“Second is that the rules that applied where you were before may not apply to where you are today. I was pretty successful at GE Health, but when I got to Invitrogen and applied GE rules, they weren’t so successful. If CEOs are not adaptable, they fall into that category of not lasting very long in the job.”
He explains, “GE was a little more Darwinian, a little more aggressive. We were removing the bottom 10 to 20 percent of all employees every year. Kind of the Jack Welch way. But I don’t think that approach is appropriate for a science-based collaborative organization. So we were one of the first companies on the S&P to remove performance evaluations. That was unheard of in 2004.
“Third rule for CEOs is to create a purpose to the place so that people come to work pumped up, fired up, ready to push out the noise and absolutely focus on what they are doing to achieve that purpose, which for us was our mission statement: shaping discovery and improving life.
“Bring everybody back to that phraseology all the time. Shaping discovery meant becoming the best partners for researchers around the world. Improving life meant taking our know-how and applying it where it can actually fundamentally change lives in cancer care, in food safety, in forensics using our DNA technology. (Life helped to develop DNA fingerprinting and remains the world’s biggest player in that space, according to Lucier.) So, our mission statement was our strategy and when you have those two line up, it’s a grand slam.”
