Immunex Team Finds Success By Shifting Its Key Players

The staff at Immunex Corp. likes to joke that no wall in the biotechnology firm's Seattle headquarters has ever stayed in one place for more than a year. Instead, the walls keep getting moved around at this nine-year-old company to make room for more scientists and more labs. Although the staffers are talking about the tangible plaster and wood walls, they might as well be talking about the invisible divisions that normally define scientific teams. At Immunex, those sorts of walls get moved around all the time, too. The boundaries that define research teams at the firm are just about as fluid as they can get, says biochemist Linda Park. And the resulting cooperation among the scientists is one reason the firm has been so successful - and rapid - in its interleukin research, says Park's colleague Ray Goodwin. The working environment at Immunex is "not like a university, where you have separate labs individually working on their own projects. Here it's much more of a mixing of everyone together," says Goodwin, a molecular biologist. The company's 201 research and development staff members are divided into seven departments. But the departments "are really kind of a superficial separation of things," Goodwin says. "Everyone is really working together and utilizing their expertise as a whole . . . You have to interact with other people to get things done here." In March, a team of Immunex scientists, including Goodwin and led by Park, reported in the journal Cell (60:941-51, 1990) that it had cloned the gene that encodes the human interleukin-7 (IL-7) receptor. This receptor is a member of a class of proteins located on immune cell surfaces that binds to immune system hormones called cytokines. Scientists believe cytokine receptors may be useful in treating at least some of about 30 known autoimmune disorders. The IL-7 receptor discovery is just the latest in a fast-paced series of discoveries about the characteristics of a whole range of cytokines and cytokine receptors. These breakthroughs have fueled an arm of the biotechnology industry in the last decade. The industry is betting that cytokines and their receptors will become important therapeutics for a range of diseases by the mid-1990s. Immunex scientists have been among the most active in the field. Since the company's founding in 1981, it has reported cloning five cytokines, including IL-1, IL-2, IL-3, IL-4, and IL-7. The firm has also cloned several cytokine receptors. Products based on the cytokine research currently are in clinical trials. Because of its small size - compared with that of established drug companies - Immunex cannot hire a whole team to work on each new project as it develops, says Dave Urdal, vice president and director of development. Instead, each project has had to draw on existing talents. This accounts in part for the casual approach the company takes toward team divisions and hierarchy. The team behind the IL-7 receptor discovery evolved in a way that is typical for the company. The paper in Cell lists 10 authors, but the team's size actually was about double that over the course of the work and included seven Ph.D.'s, says Goodwin. As the project's needs changed, team members would join in and drop out from other divisions of the company's scientific staff. The first player in the IL-7 team was Tony Namen, a scientist in the company's experimental hemotology depart- ment. In 1988 Namen and his group discovered and cloned the cytokine. This discovery laid the foundation upon which a team of biochemists, led by Park, could build. The biochemists took the new cytokine, labeled it with Iodine 125, and did the biochemical characterization that "allows us to look at the actual properties of [the cytokine] binding to its receptor on the cell surface," Park says. This work took several months. Meanwhile, the scientists were also looking for a cell or cell source with lots of receptors. Once the biochemists finished this work with IL-7, the molecular biologists, led by Goodwin, joined the project to help isolate and characterize a recombinant form of the receptor. "From there on, it [became] much more of a joint project between the molecular biologists and biochemists," Park says. Once the receptor was cloned, the molecular biologists left the team to focus on other projects, while the biochemists and a new group of biologists began work to develop the receptor into a marketable product. Throughout the project, Park has been the designated team leader, a job that doesn't carry the hierarchical trappings the name suggests. "As team leader, I don't direct other people as much as I just provide an organization," Park says. Park's key job as team leader has been to organize and run the twice-a-month project meetings for the IL-7 receptor team. The gatherings have provided a forum for discussing problems and helped make sure "everyone is aware of what the other guy is doing," she says. Each Immunex scientist typically is part of more than one project team. A consequence of this sort of organization is that there is a steady stream of meetings. On occasion, the amount of time the scientists spend in conference can be a problem, Park says, "but I think overall we've found that transmitting information is well worth the time it takes to be in the meetings." An emphasis on cooperation helps make all the teamwork productive, Park says. "I think one of our principal strengths is that we do have a sense of camaraderie rather than a sense of competition." Because of the company's focus on products that affect the immune system, the scientists tend to have common interests and a natural base for camaraderie, says Urdal. Beer-and-food socials and company-sponsored activities such as a basketball team help strengthen that base. But the camaraderie and cooperation continue because most of the scientists can see that "it works to do science in a very collaborative way and to use the strengths of other people around them," says Park. "We end up being extremely productive that way, so there's no reason to not want to do it that way. On a personal level, it's a very pleasant way . . . to do science." Kathryn Phillips is a freelance science writer based in Pasadena, Calif.

Immunex Team Finds Success By Shifting Its Key Players

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