Long before Brenda Gavin began investing in life science companies, she toiled in the trenches of public health. Fresh out of veterinary school, the Missouri native landed a two-year assignment with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS), a team of doctors, researchers, and scientists who investigate epidemics across the United States and around the globe.
Gavin's team was passionate about its work and kept long hours. Once when a task force was dispatched to Kingsport, Tenn., to investigate an outbreak of Legionnaires' disease in 1977, she and her colleagues continued sifting through medical records even as hospital employees finished their shifts and headed home. As with any investigation, the team fully expected to work until midnight or "do whatever it took" to get the job done.
"If that meant hanging by your feet in a chimney collecting bat guano or trapping rats in a dump to look for a pathogen, you did it. It didn't matter what it was," Gavin says. "It was absolutely an attitude of whatever it takes, we would get the answer."
Now a founding partner at the Philadelphia venture capital (VC) firm Quaker BioVentures, Gavin still rolls up her sleeves to get the job done. "She'll always take time for somebody, and she also lends her time to organizations that really support entrepreneurs in the region," says Meryle Melnicoff, director of business development at the Wistar Institute and past president of the Women's Investment Network.
Growing up in the rural Ozark region of southern Missouri, Gavin spent a lot of time around farms and animals. Having studied biology and chemistry at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, she decided to go on to veterinary school, earning her Doctor of Veterinary Medicine degree from the University of Missouri in 1977.
After her EIS tour of duty, Gavin took stock of her skills and decided to apply to business school. The University of Pennsylvania's prestigious Wharton School offered her admission, but she chose the University of Texas at San Antonio instead. As it turns out, it was a fortuitous move that set the stage for her career. While Wharton was minting future investment bankers, Gavin's UT professors were talking about a field she had never heard about before - venture capital - and she was intrigued.
It wasn't easy to break in. Gavin pushed her way into the field, first convincing her employer, Chicago-based International Minerals and Chemical Corp. (which became Mallinckrodt), to let her invest the company's money as a limited partner in venture funds. Later at SmithKline's animal health division in Pennsylvania, she made herself known to the people running the company's own venture fund, S.R. One Ltd. Gavin was on maternity leave when she heard that a partner had left. She called him, "and literally the first words out of his mouth were, 'I know you wanted my job.'" She got the job, and when president and founder Peter Sears retired, she got his job, too.
Gavin's involvement with Quaker BioVentures began following a breakfast meeting with her now-partner P. Sherrill Neff, who invited her to join him in launching this regionally focused fund in the fall of 2001. Gavin knew instinctively that it made sense. While the fund scouts as far south as Florida for good deals that yield a solid return for investors, the focus remains on the mid-Atlantic region. Gavin reasons, "Why be in a situation where 10 other people are looking at the same deal if you can find good deals where you are?" Quaker now manages more than $500 million in committed capital, with some two-dozen life science companies mostly headquartered in Pennsylvania.
Today, Gavin sits on numerous boards, including that of BioAdvance, the local "greenhouse," and also the Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Southeastern Pennsylvania, an economic development organization. Fledgling companies turn to both for critical seed capital. "Brenda is one of the key 'connectors' in the life sciences community in the region," notes Barbara Schilberg, managing director and chief executive officer of BioAdvance. Even when a company is too young or not the right fit for Quaker, Gavin makes time to give feedback and advice, adds Wistar's Melnicoff.
Greater Philadelphia's life sciences engine has come a long way since the birth of biotechnology in the late 1970s. Back then, Gavin says, California's biotech industry dominated, having benefited from an already strong venture community and practically no pharmaceutical competition for bright young people coming out of postdoc programs.
"Today I think we're in the catbird seat," Gavin asserts. For one thing, she says, the region is teeming with people who've earned respect in the pharmaceutical industry and know how to develop products to FDA standards. "Those are the kind of people I want in my companies," she notes. The management team of East Norriton, Pa.-based Tengion, one of Quaker's portfolio companies, for example, is composed of former employees of Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, and Johnson & Johnson, among other top drug makers. Today, too, the region's pharmaceutical giants are much more open to working with small companies, even acquiring them in some cases. As Gavin puts it: "Big Pharma no longer looks down its nose."
Now that the region's life sciences entrepreneurial community is "coming into its own," venture capitalists are beginning to take notice, Gavin says, and that will spur more involvement in the region. "My partners and I get calls from VCs outside the region every day, asking us about companies in our backyard." she says. Gavin also predicts that more funds will grow up locally or open offices in the region. "We especially need early-stage investors, but there is a shortage of capital at all stages when compared with the opportunities that abound," she adds.
Apart from work, Gavin's exposure to cutting-edge science has been a boon for cocktail party banter. She says people often ask her husband, Laurence Gavin, chief of emergency medicine at Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, about experimental treatments they've heard or read about. "He'll just say, 'If it's not approved yet, I don't want to know about it. Ask her.'"