Wikipedia Deep Dive

Genentech

10 min read

The Company That Turned Biology Into Industry

In 1976, a venture capitalist cold-called a biochemist and proposed something that had never been done before: turning the cutting-edge science of genetic engineering into a commercial enterprise. That phone call created Genentech, widely regarded as the world's first biotechnology company—and in doing so, launched an entirely new industry.

The story begins not in a boardroom, but in a laboratory at the University of California, San Francisco. Herbert Boyer had just helped demonstrate something remarkable. Along with his colleague Stanley Norman Cohen, he showed that you could use specialized proteins called restriction enzymes as molecular scissors. These enzymes could cut DNA at precise locations, allowing scientists to snip out a gene from one organism and paste it into another.

Think of it like editing a manuscript. Before restriction enzymes, working with DNA was like trying to edit a book while blindfolded, using mittens. Suddenly, scientists had sharp scissors and could see exactly where they were cutting.

From Laboratory Trick to Commercial Product

While Cohen returned to academic research, Boyer received an unexpected visitor: Robert Swanson, a young venture capitalist who saw commercial potential in this new genetic engineering technique. Most scientists at the time thought any practical applications were decades away. Swanson disagreed.

The company they founded moved fast. Within a year, Boyer's team achieved another first: they expressed a human gene inside bacteria. The gene coded for somatostatin, a hormone involved in regulating growth. This was proof of concept—bacteria could be engineered to manufacture human proteins.

The following year, 1978, they went bigger. The team produced synthetic human insulin using bacteria, and by 1982, that insulin became the first genetically engineered human therapeutic ever approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration. For the millions of diabetics who relied on insulin extracted from pig or cow pancreases—insulin that sometimes caused allergic reactions because it wasn't quite identical to human insulin—this was transformative.

Genentech didn't manufacture the insulin themselves. They partnered with Eli Lilly and Company, an established pharmaceutical company with the manufacturing infrastructure and regulatory expertise to shepherd the product to market. This partnership model—a nimble biotech company handling discovery while a pharmaceutical giant handled commercialization—would become a template for the industry.

Building a Pipeline

What followed was a steady stream of innovations, each representing a different approach to using biotechnology for medicine.

In 1985, Genentech launched Protropin, a growth hormone for children with growth hormone deficiency. This drug would later become the subject of a bitter patent dispute with UCSF, eventually settled for $200 million. The university claimed Genentech had used research developed at UCSF; Genentech maintained they'd developed the drug independently. The settlement, reached in 1999, funded a new UCSF campus and rewarded the scientists involved, but left the underlying question of who really invented what legally unresolved.

In 1987 came Activase, a tissue plasminogen activator used to dissolve blood clots in heart attack patients. This represented a different kind of biotechnology product—not replacing a missing hormone, but deploying a specialized protein to treat an acute medical emergency.

The 1990s brought Pulmozyme, an inhaled treatment for cystic fibrosis patients. Cystic fibrosis causes thick, sticky mucus to build up in the lungs, partly because dying cells release their DNA into that mucus. Pulmozyme is a genetically engineered enzyme that breaks down that DNA, thinning the mucus and making it easier to clear.

The Monoclonal Antibody Revolution

But Genentech's most significant contributions came in a category called monoclonal antibodies. To understand why these matter, you need to understand how antibodies work.

Your immune system produces antibodies—Y-shaped proteins that recognize and bind to specific targets. Each antibody fits its target like a key fits a lock. When you get infected with a virus, your body eventually produces antibodies that recognize proteins on that virus's surface. Those antibodies mark the virus for destruction by other immune cells.

Monoclonal antibodies are laboratory-produced versions of these natural defense proteins, designed to recognize specific targets. Scientists can engineer them to bind to cancer cells, inflammatory molecules, or almost any target of interest.

In 1997, Genentech launched Rituxan (rituximab), a monoclonal antibody targeting a protein found on certain immune cells. It was approved for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, a cancer of these immune cells. The antibody marks the cancer cells for destruction. Later, the same drug was approved for rheumatoid arthritis, where it helps by reducing the overactive immune response that damages joints.

Then came Herceptin in 1998. This drug represented a new approach to cancer treatment—targeted therapy based on the genetic characteristics of a patient's tumor. About 20 to 25 percent of breast cancers overexpress a protein called HER2, which drives aggressive tumor growth. Herceptin is a monoclonal antibody that blocks HER2, and it transformed the prognosis for patients with HER2-positive breast cancer from one of the worst to one of the most treatable.

The Avastin Story: Promise and Controversy

In 2004, Genentech introduced Avastin (bevacizumab), and with it, a story that illustrates both the promise and complexity of modern cancer treatment.

Avastin works differently from Herceptin. Instead of targeting cancer cells directly, it targets the blood vessels that feed tumors. Tumors need blood supply to grow, and they send out chemical signals—particularly a protein called vascular endothelial growth factor, or VEGF—to stimulate new blood vessel growth. Avastin is an anti-VEGF antibody that blocks this signal, essentially starving the tumor of nutrients.

The drug was first approved for metastatic colorectal cancer. Approvals followed for lung cancer, kidney cancer, and glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer. In 2008, it received accelerated approval for advanced breast cancer.

But that breast cancer approval became controversial. The accelerated approval was based on promising early data, but subsequent studies showed that while Avastin slowed tumor growth, it didn't significantly extend patients' lives and came with serious side effects. In 2011, the FDA took the unusual step of revoking its breast cancer approval—one of the rare occasions the agency has withdrawn an accelerated approval.

This episode highlighted a tension in cancer drug development: is slowing tumor growth valuable even if it doesn't extend survival? Should cost factor into approval decisions? Avastin became a symbol in debates about healthcare spending, memorably featured in a 2006 New York Times article titled "A Cancer Drug Shows Promise, at a Price That Many Can't Pay."

Ownership and Independence

Throughout its history, Genentech navigated an unusual corporate structure. In 1990, the Swiss pharmaceutical giant F. Hoffmann-La Roche acquired a majority stake in the company. For nearly two decades, Genentech operated as a semi-independent entity—majority owned by Roche but maintaining its own research culture, its own management, and its own stock listing.

This changed in 2009 when Roche acquired the remaining shares for approximately $46.8 billion, making Genentech a wholly owned subsidiary. The company retained significant autonomy, however. Genentech Research and Early Development continues to operate as an independent center within Roche, maintaining the research-driven culture that defined the company from its founding.

The company also made acquisitions of its own. In 2006, it acquired Tanox, which had been developing Xolair, an antibody treatment for severe asthma. In 2014, it acquired Seragon for $725 million upfront, plus up to $1 billion more depending on how Seragon's cancer drug candidates progressed through development.

Collaborations and Controversies

Genentech's approach to research has always involved extensive collaborations. It partnered repeatedly with UCSF, despite their earlier legal battles. It collaborated with 23andMe, the consumer genetic testing company, gaining access to genomic data and patient-reported information that could inform drug discovery. It partnered with academic institutions, small biotechs, and even data science training organizations.

But the company also attracted controversy beyond patent disputes. In 2009, The New York Times reported that identical language about biotechnology policy appeared in statements from multiple members of Congress—language that had originated in talking points drafted by Genentech lobbyists. Two representatives issued the exact same written statement praising the domestic biotechnology industry and criticizing companies that outsourced research to foreign countries.

This episode illustrated how pharmaceutical companies attempt to shape the regulatory environment in which they operate. Genentech maintains a Political Action Committee that aggregates contributions from employees to donate to federal candidates, and donates to organizations that lobby on healthcare policy.

Recent Developments and Manufacturing

The company's manufacturing footprint has evolved significantly. Its headquarters remain in South San Francisco, in a campus that has grown substantially since those early days in 1976. Additional manufacturing facilities operated in Vacaville, California; Oceanside, California; and Hillsboro, Oregon.

In 2023, Genentech announced plans to close its South San Francisco manufacturing facility while expanding capacity in Oceanside. Then in 2024, Roche sold the Vacaville site to Lonza, a Swiss contract manufacturing company, for $1.2 billion. This followed an earlier transaction where Genentech had sold a facility in Spain to Lonza in 2006.

The company also expanded internationally, building facilities in Singapore for manufacturing both large-molecule biologics (using mammalian cell culture) and small-molecule drugs (using bacterial fermentation).

The Product Legacy

Looking at Genentech's product portfolio reveals the evolution of biotechnology medicine over four decades.

The early products replaced missing proteins: insulin for diabetics, growth hormone for children who didn't produce enough naturally. Then came proteins that dissolved blood clots or broke down problematic molecules. Monoclonal antibodies followed, first targeting cancer cells, then inflammatory conditions.

More recent products show increasing sophistication. Kadcyla, approved in 2013, is an antibody-drug conjugate—it combines the targeting ability of Herceptin with a potent cell-killing agent, delivering chemotherapy specifically to cancer cells while sparing healthy tissue. Tecentriq, approved in 2016, represents the checkpoint inhibitor revolution—it blocks a protein that cancer cells use to hide from the immune system, essentially removing the brakes from the body's natural defenses.

Ocrevus, approved in 2017, treats multiple sclerosis, including the primary progressive form that previously had no approved treatments. Hemlibra treats hemophilia A by mimicking the function of a missing clotting factor. Xofluza, developed by the Japanese company Shionogi and partnered with Genentech, treats influenza through a novel mechanism.

What Genentech Represents

Genentech matters not just for its products, but for what it demonstrated about turning basic science into practical medicine. When Boyer and Cohen first demonstrated recombinant DNA technology in 1973, it was a laboratory curiosity. Three years later, Genentech was founded. Six years after that, the first product reached patients.

This timeline seems almost impossibly fast by today's standards. Drug development now typically takes 10 to 15 years and costs billions of dollars. But Genentech helped establish the model: academic scientists make fundamental discoveries, biotechnology companies translate those discoveries into potential drugs, and pharmaceutical companies or the biotechs themselves commercialize the results.

The company also demonstrated that biotechnology could be commercially viable. This wasn't obvious in 1976. Most observers thought genetic engineering was dangerous, impractical, or both. Genentech proved that recombinant DNA technology could produce drugs that were actually better than traditional alternatives—human insulin identical to what the body produces naturally, rather than cow or pig insulin that sometimes triggered immune reactions.

Today, biotechnology is a trillion-dollar global industry. Monoclonal antibodies alone represent some of the best-selling drugs in history. Gene therapies and cell therapies are advancing into clinical practice. CRISPR gene editing promises even more precise control over genetic material.

All of this traces back, in some sense, to that 1976 phone call between a venture capitalist and a biochemist who thought they might be able to make a business out of cutting and pasting genes. They were right.