Recently Ousted Genentech President G. Kirk Raab Named Board Chairman At Shaman Pharmaceuticals

Named Board Chairman At Shaman Pharmaceuticals Author: Franklin Hoke After an abrupt departure in July from his posts as president, chief executive officer, and director of Genentech Inc., G. Kirk Raab, 59, was elected chairman of the smaller Shaman Pharmaceuticals Inc. last month. Both biotechnology companies are based in South San Francisco, Calif. BACK IN THE SADDLE: As board chairman, G. Kirk Raab will advise Shaman Pharmaceuticals' president and CEO, Lisa Conte. Shaman's approach to finding candidate drugs is to identify plant-based medicines being used in traditional and tribal cultures; these substances are then investigated further in the laboratory. Raab, whose primarily advisory role at Shaman will support company president and CEO Lisa Conte, says that he is also talking to a number of other companies about establishing similar advisory relationships with them. According to a Genentech statement, Raab was dismissed by Genentech's board of directors after disclosure that he had asked two-thirds owner Roche Holdings Ltd., headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, to guarantee a $2 million personal loan. The request came during negotiations to persuade Roche to exercise its option to buy the remainder of Genentech's stock by June 30, which Roche proved unwilling to do. In the course of the talks, Raab convinced Roche to extend its option until 1999. A special independent committee appointed by Genentech's board to review the Roche deal and Raab's loan request recommended his removal, and the board replaced him on July 10 with senior vice president for research Arthur D. Levinson, a biochemist. Raab declines to discuss his ouster in detail. He does suggest, however, that there may have been reasons for the board's actions against him beyond the personal loan request he acknowledges making during the Roche negotiations. "I don't feel I did anything unethical or incorrect," Raab maintains. "I wish I hadn't done it, because, obviously, it was the trigger. But the whole situation was much more complicated than that [one circumstance]." The Genentech statement said, "Following its extensive review of Mr. Raab's leadership over the past few years, the special committee recommended that the Board request and accept Raab's resignation." Under Raab, Genentech had been criticized in recent years by physicians, patients, competitors, and federal officials for excessively aggressive sales practices involving its growth hormone product, Nutropin. The company statement did not comment on the criticisms, noting instead Raab's "significant contributions" to Genentech, including the fact that, "in the last five years, the company's revenues have almost doubled, earnings have almost tripled, and twice as many drugs are in Phase III development." In Shaman, Raab sees a drug-development company with an unusual orientation to discovering new drugs, one quite different from the recombinant-technologies strategy of Genentech. He notes that this fact has the added advantage of keeping him clear of potential conflicts of interest based on his extensive knowledge of Genentech's science and goals. While some large pharmaceutical companies are also looking at the possibility of botanical-based drugs, as is Shaman, they use less-efficient methods, according to Raab. "They do broad screening programs, as they have with soil samples, for example, and it's a very serendipitous type of research that has no place [in drug development] today," he contends. "Shaman doesn't do that. Not only do we have ethnobotanists out in the field, we have physicians out in the field who are looking at the people using the products [given to them by local care providers] to confirm that they have symptoms of herpes, diabetes, or whatever it happens to be, and that there is some reason to believe that there could be a therapeutic benefit from the plant or root being given to them." Also, drug candidates found through Shaman's approach have a higher likelihood of being safe than those discovered through pure laboratory science, according to Raab. This is an important consideration when looking ahead to the costly and time-consuming clinical trials required by the Food and Drug Administration for marketing approval. "When we decide to develop a drug, it's already been used in human beings for a long time, in some cases, hundreds of years or more," he observes. "We have a reasonable assurance that there's less liability as far as safety problems. And when you're working on small molecules, that's always a very significant potential problem and an unknown until you get into some pretty expensive animal work or into humans themselves." After graduating from Colgate University in 1959 with a B.A. in fine arts, Raab started in the pharmaceutical business as a salesman with Pfizer Inc. in New York. He worked in Pfizer's sales and marketing groups in the United States and Central America until 1965, when he joined A.H. Robins Inc., Richmond, Va., as general manager for operations in Mexico. In 1968, he became vice president for Latin America of Beecham Group Ltd., Brentford, England. Raab moved to Abbott Laboratories Inc. in Chicago in 1975 as vice president for international operations, rising to executive vice president and director in 1980 and president, chief operating officer, and director in 1981. In 1985, Genentech named him chief operating officer and director and then, in 1990, president, CEO, and director. -Franklin Hoke (The Scientist, Vol:9, #20, pg.17 , October 16, 1995) (Copyright © The Scientist, Inc.)

Recently Ousted Genentech President G. Kirk Raab Named Board Chairman At Shaman Pharmaceuticals

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