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CEO Who Led Growth to Leave MedImmune
David Mott had agreed to stay at MedImmune for a year after its acquisition.
(Timothy Jacobsen)
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"This isn't what we built MedImmune to do," Mott said in August. "The vision for all the entrepreneurs sitting in this room is probably not to sell your baby to a big pharmaceutical company."
But he conceded, "The rewarding part to me, which is kind of amazing, is how good it's actually turned out."
Mott remained chief executive of MedImmune and joined AstraZeneca's executive team as a senior member. AstraZeneca offered all of MedImmune's employees a bonus to stay and named MedImmune a wholly owned subsidiary.
Mott's exit tracks the typical business life cycle of a biotech entrepreneur, said John Holaday, chief executive of QRxPharma, a biotech firm based in Australia but run locally.
"It's indicative of growth of an industry," said Holaday, who previously co-founded Rockville's EntreMed in 1992. "Leaders within a company step aside, go out and do it again and do it again. That's why the industries in San Francisco and Boston are so mature."
As a company, MedImmune has helped usher an era of growth for the local biotech cluster.
Founded two decades ago by Wayne T. Hockmeyer, a former Walter Reed Army Institute of Research scientist, MedImmune has been homegrown in Maryland. Its best-selling drug, Synagis, was among the few local biotech drugs to succeed in the marketplace.
"It's done what other companies haven't been able to do before -- or since," Holaday said.
After Mott took the reins from Hockmeyer in 2000, he steered Synagis to nearly $900 million in sales, opened the company's new $88 million headquarters and expanded the workforce.
Mott was able to boast that the company had launched a number of drugs out of laboratories and into the marketplace.
His colleagues said Mott is a boss who rolls up his sleeves and digs in.
"He was an enormously effective leader," said H. Thomas Watkins, president and chief executive of Human Genome Sciences.
But there were also bad times for the company.
The launch of FluMist, a nasal flu vaccine, was taxing and disastrous. MedImmune was unable to win approval for vaccinating young children and the elderly. The drug suffered from poor marketing and difficulty storing the first-generation version, which had to be frozen.
When AstraZeneca acquired MedImmune, Montgomery County lost a drug company headquarters but gained an international pharmaceutical presence.
Whatever Mott decides to do next, he has a clearly established legacy, said David Edgerly, Secretary of the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development.
"He elevated the stature of Maryland in the world life sciences community," he said.
