Edwin Moses

For most of his career, Edwin Moses was an executive manager in a series of European biotechnology firms, holding posts such as marketing manager, sales and marketing director, chief operations officer, chief executive officer, president, and chairman.

However, in 2001, he took on the first of what has developed into a portfolio of nonexecutive directorships in the industry. And the switch from the executive to the nonexecutive role, he says now, was a challenging task.

"There are a lot of downsides to being a nonexec," Moses concedes. As an executive officer, a person is wrapped up in being "a member of a team, going in the same direction--there's a good feeling to that." A nonexec, he says, "gets bits of that feeling, but not really. I miss that."

In his new role, the 50-year-old Moses says he has had to teach himself to be a good facilitator. "I was always a good doer, but in this role, you have to teach yourself to work through others. As a doer, there is a tremendous temptation to do it yourself, but you can't. You have to work very hard to not do that. I wanted to learn," he adds, "and have gotten better. But I probably started from a very low base. You have to be very patient, and that is not one of my basic virtues."

Clearly, though, companies in the biotechnology industry welcome the contribution Moses can make as a nonexecutive leader. Now back home in England, he is chairman of Inpharmatica, Paradigm Therapeutics, ClinPhone Ltd., and Pharmaceutical Profiles--all in the U.K.--and of the Belgian firm Ablynx. He is chairman of the supervisory boards of the Danish firm BioImage and the Dutch company Avantium Technologies.

He is a director of Ionix of the U.K. And he is a member of the supervisory board of the Anglo-German firm Evotec OAI, which he helped form in 2000 through the merger of Evotec Biosystems and the company he then headed, Oxford University spin-off Oxford Asymmetry International.

Recalling that process, Moses says the OAI board recognized early in 2000 that organic growth would no longer be sufficient to maintain the successful development of the company. After an intensive search for potential partners, he says, "we identified Evotec Biosystems--a German public company involved in biological assay development and ultra-high-throughput screening--as a good fit." The two companies announced the merger in July 2000, and it was wrapped up that December.

There were differences to overcome. Perhaps surprisingly, they had nothing to do with the English or German languages, Moses says, but rather showed up in differing company cultures. "OAI was a company that put a lot of emphasis on cash generation--it was highly short-term oriented. Evotec, on the other hand, was much more focused on the longer term, with a strategy promoting medium- to long-term growth. That was the cultural clash," he says. "Neither way is wrong--the approaches were just at the opposite ends of the spectrum."

For Moses, a life in biotechnology was a natural synthesis of his interests in school.

"I liked biology when I was young, but you had to dissect animals, and I wouldn't do that. So I went into chemistry," he explains. His Ph.D. thesis was based on a study of lysozymes in aqueous solutions. His postdoc work, in the department of biophysical chemistry at the University of Regensburg in what was then West Germany, centered on the physical chemistry of nucleic acids and proteins.

From there, Moses joined Bethesda Research Laboratories as a technical sales representative for Germany, and he has been involved in biotechnology--developing companies to serve the life sciences sector--ever since. For example, in the 1980s, he helped turn Enzymatix into the forerunner of both Celsis International and Chiroscience. The latter was acquired in 2002 by Celltech, which in turn was acquired last year by Belgium's UCB.

Biotech firms, Moses argues, "must ensure that their commercial model is sustainable. The amount of money put in by venture capitalists is really quite large--there can be some risk. If we can do things that allow investors to get benefits, we have a sustainable business even without going into clinical trials."

In fact, Moses is a strong proponent of staying in early-stage research--whether for in-house purposes or outside customers--rather than gambling on taking pharmaceuticals through expensive clinical testing and onto the market. As he sees it, "our skills are early on. Why don't we stay in that, rather than going further?

"For example, at OAI, we were a service company. We could make money even from the nine out of 10 compounds that don't make it," he points out. If a company is involved in the one out of 10 that is a winner, that's fine--but clearly less probable.

Moses says biotech companies must ask themselves: "What can we realistically achieve? What skill sets do we really have? Where can we be really successful? Where are there tight little niches where it is difficult for other companies to get into?" These, he says, are typical market approaches. What's important, he adds, is that companies not get carried away by the thought of a big blockbuster. "You can do very, very well by getting the right niche."