Photo courtesy of ChemGenex TherapeuticsDennis Brown left an assistant professorship at Harvard's Joint Center for Radiation in 1988 to start Matrix Pharmaceuticals. When that company sold, Brown's inner entrepreneur led him to create ChemGenex in 1999. The company works with small-molecule therapies and has two in Phase I and II clinical trials for cancer. "The first company did what it set out to do," Brown says. "Many people got significant training and went on to start their own companies."P

Ensconced in a darkened room at GlaxoSmithKline's suburban Philadelphia campus, Lara Kallander brings up an image of an X-ray crystallized compound on a wall screen. The image looks like a heap of brightly colored children's pickup-sticks arrayed at random angles. Kallander puts on a weighty pair of 3-D glasses. At first the left eye is annoyingly fuzzy, as if the lens is smudged. Then she hits a few keystrokes on the computer and suddenly the pickup sticks seem to pop off the screen. The lin