A faded red Volkswagen dune buggy sails into the parking lot of a forgettable brown cinderblock building in Seattle with Johnny Stine at the wheel. Stine’s transportation and vision for his biotechnology lab are straight out of the 1970s, when Genentech started in a warehouse, and Bill Gates and Paul Allen created Microsoft on a shoestring. Now, Stine is trying to do the same with North Coast Biologics. Most companies need only a coffee pot and eager minds to get started, but Stine’s, which makes monoclonal antibodies, needs flow hoods, CO2 incubators and high-throughput robotics. To get these pricey items, he has taken a bargain-hunting, do-it-yourself approach that fits today’s new frugality.
In the cinderblock building’s aggressively unglamorous storage garage, which doubles as a cell culture room, water stains on the cement floor are paired with tidy patches in the ceiling above. The nearly 100 square-meter space is all bare-bones ...
