Genentech

History

The company was founded in 1976 by venture capitalist Robert A. Swanson and biochemist Herbert Boyer. Boyer is considered to be a pioneer in the field of recombinant DNA technology. In 1973, Boyer and his colleague Stanley Norman Cohen demonstrated that restriction enzymes could be used as "scissors" to cut DNA fragments of interest from one source, to be ligated into a similarly cut plasmid vector. While Cohen returned to the laboratory in academia, Swanson contacted Boyer to found the company. Boyer worked with Arthur Riggs and Keiichi Itakura from the Beckman Research Institute, and the group became the first to successfully express a human gene in bacteria when they produced the hormone somatostatin in 1977. David Goeddel and Dennis Kleid were then added to the group, and contributed to its success with synthetic human insulin in 1978.

In 1982, Genentech agreed to sell a 6.5 percent equity stake to Corning Glass Works under which the companies created a jointly owned venture called Genencor to develop industrial enzymes using recombinant DNA technology.

In 1990 F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG acquired a majority stake in Genentech.

In 2006 Genentech acquired Tanox in its first acquisition deal. Tanox had started developing Xolair and development was completed in collaboration with Novartis and Genentech; the acquisition allowed Genentech to keep more of the revenue.

In March 2009, Roche fully acquired Genentech and made it a wholly owned subsidiary by buying all remaining shares it did not already control for approximately $46.8 billion.