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A s a junior bank clerk in Dublin in the mid-1960s, one of Reg Shaw's weekly duties was to act as an independent witness to the actual counting of cash in the CEO's office. Back then, the idea that he would later help found one of the world's largest biotechnology production facilities less than 10 miles away must have been beyond his comprehension, to say nothing of his boss.

That facility, Wyeth's €1.4 billion ($2.2 billion US) biotech campus at Grange Castle on the southwestern outskirts of Dublin, has acquired emblematic status within Ireland's biopharmaceutical industry. It has established the country's international reputation as a location for the production of modern biologics and has influenced several other firms to locate biologics projects in Ireland, including Centocor, Eli Lilly, Merck, and Amgen (although the latter has frozen its project for internal reasons).

Wyeth's 111,500-m2 campus produces Enbrel (etanercept), an anti-inflammatory drug and the world's bestselling biotechnology product; Prevnar, a pediatric pneumococcal vaccine and the word's first ever blockbuster vaccine; and the recently approved Tygacil (tigecycline), a glycylcycline antibiotic. It also houses an extensive process-development research activity.

Shaw's journey, from the bank on Harcourt Street in central Dublin to Grange Castle, was anything but linear. A County Clare native, he had gone directly into the world of work after leaving school. "Life was quite different then. Opportunities were pretty limited," he says. Family circumstances did not permit a college education, but that opportunity did come his way after he joined the diamond manufacturer, Diamond & Carbide (now DeBeers), in Shannon, County Clare. He was one of two employees to be accepted into a scholarship program, and he started undergraduate studies in chemistry at University College Galway (now the National University of Ireland, Galway) in the late 1960s. While there, he developed a lifelong passion for photography and even picked up work as an assistant to a local professional. He graduated with a science degree in 1971 and stayed on to complete a PhD in physical chemistry in 1974.

Shortly afterwards, he moved to Cork to join what was then SmithKline & French. For the next 25 years, he rose through the ranks of the organization, which, at different stages, was known as SmithKline Beckman and SmithKline Beecham. He became head of the Cork facility after a successful six-month stint in Puerto Rico in 1980, where he led a team responsible for bringing in-house a key step in the synthesis of Tagamet (cimetidine), the ulcer and heartburn drug. "It was the world's first billion dollar pharmaceutical product," Shaw recalls.

In the early 1990s, he moved to Philadelphia, Pa., where he spent four years in charge of all fill-finish facilities in the United States and Puerto Rico. In 1996, he moved to London, and by the following year, he was in charge of all global manufacturing, with responsibility for 7,000 staff and $2.3 billion worth of assets. He decided to exit in 1999 as the merger with Glaxo Wellcome to form London-based GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) started to take shape.

A call from a former colleague, who had moved to New Jersey-based Wyeth (then American Home Products), quickly put to rest any notions of early retirement. Shaw was recruited to head up Wyeth's massive project, which was a key to removing the bottleneck in the supply of Enbrel, the TNF-a inhibitor that the pharma company markets outside of North America. "I was employee number one. I had to start from scratch, literally in every sense," Shaw recalls. The whole project, which at its peak employed 2,500 in construction, went remarkably smoothly. "We came within about a month of our original target that we'd set five years earlier," he says.

Shaw's affable demeanor and old-world courteousness belie the kind of steel required to deliver a project on that scale and within the demanding timelines required by Big Pharma. "He knows well how to manage a project, and he knows well how to manage people too," says Matt Moran, director of PharmaChemical Ireland, the body that represents pharmaceutical manufacturers there. Ireland's success at attracting and retaining multinational pharma manufacturers, Moran says, is linked to the fact that Irish personnel run the plants that are located in Ireland. "They always want to do well for the corporations they work for, but they also want to do well for Ireland," he says.

"He really has been so willing to give his time to promote Ireland as a location for biologics," notes Barry O'Leary, CEO of IDA Ireland, who recalls Shaw's participation in a three-day showcase to senior overseas biotech and Big Pharma executives.

Now 62 years of age, Shaw stepped down from his position as managing director of the Wyeth BioPharma Campus late last year, but retirement is still elusive. He continues to work as a consultant for Wyeth, and he is engaged in a widening portfolio of other activities. He is chair of the Health Research Board, Ireland, which has an annual research budget of around €40 million ($62 million US). He also chairs a UK pharmaceutical manufacturing-services firm, Excelsyn, and he is on numerous other industry and government boards and advisory bodies. On the home front, he's been bringing his project management skills to completing a new house in Cork, the city that has remained home throughout his career. "That was probably more difficult than the Grange Castle project - definitely, in unit terms, it was more costly," he quips.