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TWST: Could we begin with a brief overview of the company, including the
history?
Dr. Rubinfeld: Yes, in order to talk about the history, I will begin
with a brief summary of my history a little bit in order to put the
company into perspective. I was instrumental in starting the Bristol-
Myers oncology business back in the early Seventies. All the drugs at
Bristol-Myers that time were in-licensed, and I was responsible for in-
licensing the original oncology drugs. I left Bristol-Myers and became
one of the co-Founders of Amgen. I was the first executive at the vice
presidential level to move from the pharmaceutical industry into the
biotech industry. The reason I went to Amgen is because I knew how to
develop drugs. One of the problems with the early days of biotech is
that nobody really knew what a drug was. They were all mostly academic
people who founded the biotech industry. I was successful in Amgen
because I knew how to identify and in-license promising drugs. The
reason I emphasize in-licensing is because that is one of the major
cornerstones of our company. After I left Amgen I retired for a while,
but I found that retirement was not to my liking. So I came out of
retirement and founded SuperGen. I called it SuperGen because I wanted
it to be a super Amgen. It was really founded on the idea of being a
real company. In other words, most of the 2,000 biotech companies in
1990 when I founded SuperGen were unprofitable. There may have been only
three or four profitable ones. And still to this day maybe there are
only a handful. Mostly, these companies were founded on technology,
hoping to find products rather than the other way around. So I founded
SuperGen with the idea that it would be a real company. A real company,
a company that would have products. I would have late-stage products,
and they ultimately would be profitable. And so that briefly brings us
to how I founded SuperGen.
Tickers included in this excerpt: SUPG
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