Life After DuPont

At the end of 1995, DuPont employed 105,000 people around the world; 10 years later, that figure was 60,000, a loss of 45,000 men and women at what was once one of the world's largest companies.

Many of these employees ended up at new firms after DuPont sold large businesses such as its Conoco oil and gas subsidiary or its Invista fibers operation. Other employees, often based at DuPont's Wilmington, Del., headquarters, were victims of downsizings or restructurings and left for far-off pastures.

Another group of employees, though, left the company but didn't leave the area. Bound to the region by family, friends, or other ties, these people stuck around to join fledgling outfits or to start new ones.

Today, a new crop of companies, mostly involved in the life sciences, is growing up in the Wilmington region under the leadership of people who cut their teeth at DuPont. Such firms are providing opportunities for ex-DuPonters in an entrepreneurial environment that these people say they relish after their years with a large corporation.

A pivotal date for many former DuPonters is Oct. 1, 2001, the day that Bristol-Myers Squibb completed its purchase of DuPont Pharmaceuticals for $7.8 billion.

Within weeks, BMS disclosed that it would extend job offers to only 3,000 of the roughly 5,000 former DuPont Pharma employees. Then a year later, BMS announced the closure of former DuPont drug research labs in Wilmington and Deepwater, N.J., moves that affected 655 employees, many of them chemists and other scientists.

One of these scientists was Hui-Yin (Harry) Li. Born in China, Li joined DuPont in 1990 after earning his Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the Tokyo Institute of Technology. Li worked as a medicinal chemist for four years at what was then the DuPont Merck Pharmaceutical joint venture before joining the Deepwater-based process R&D department in 1995.

After the Deepwater shutdown was announced, Li says, he was asked to join a BMS process development team in central New Jersey. However, he didn't want to move or to make the hour-and-a-half commute that some of his former DuPont colleagues were enduring. "My wife is still at DuPont, and it just didn't make sense for our family," he says.

Li kicked around for a few months before deciding to try starting a company that would provide services to small biotech firms. He formed Wilmington PharmaTech, thinking he would set up shop in Wilmington, but he ended up launching his firm in Newark, Del., in early 2003 after obtaining laboratory space in the Delaware Technology Park.

Wilmington PharmaTech now has 12 employees, three of whom are former DuPonters. At the technology park, the company carries out process R&D for new drugs, including multikilogram projects under current Good Manufacturing Practices (cGMP) conditions, and it maintains partners in China that can conduct larger scale synthesis.

Although Li was buffeted about by DuPont, he holds no grudges against the company and in fact continues to work with researchers in DuPont's Central R&D labs, which are just a few miles up Interstate 95. One of Wilmington PharmaTech's specialties is drug salt and polymorph screening, for which it rents time on DuPont's scanning and transmission electron microscopes. Li also calls on chemists in DuPont's fluorine chemistry department for assistance with difficult fluorination projects.

Li acknowledges that becoming a businessman has been a challenge. "Basically, you have to transform yourself from being a scientist," he says. "I was just doing fancy chemistry and not caring about other things, and suddenly I had to take care of everything−recruiting, human resources, the electricity bill, everything."

Michael B. Maurin, vice president of the drug development services firm QS Pharma, tells a similar story. Maurin joined DuPont in 1988 after earning a Ph.D. in pharmaceutical sciences from the University of Kentucky and stayed with the drug business for 14 years as it went from being part of DuPont, to becoming a joint venture with Merck, and then back to DuPont again.

After the sale to BMS, Maurin, like Li, was offered a position at a BMS lab in New Jersey; also like Li, he declined. Maurin chose instead to act on talks he had been having with a colleague, fellow DuPont pharmaceutical scientist Madurai G. Ganesan, about starting their own firm.

Maurin and Ganesan set up labs in Boothwyn, Pa., about 10 miles from their former Wilmington base, and launched QS Pharma in early 2002. The company's first six employees were all former DuPonters; in fact, 15 of its first 16 staffers had worked for DuPont. Some, Maurin says, had lost their jobs in one of the two layoff rounds, and others voluntarily left positions at DuPont or BMS to try their fortunes with the new company.

Today, QS has 40 employees who are focused on providing cGMP and chemistry, manufacturing, and controls (CMC) services to the pharmaceutical industry. According to Maurin, QS has worked with 45 companies, many of which are small or start-up firms, and has helped convert more than 30 new chemical entities into dosage forms for clinical studies.

Maurin credits DuPont for helping him and his colleagues develop the technical know-how that they now provide to other companies going through the drug development process. And he says he didn't count on DuPont to provide him with a life-long career. "The size of an organization is not a guarantee of job security," he notes. "Your career path is determined by the skills you develop on your own."

Probably the biggest contingent of former DuPont scientists now works for Incyte, a drug company based, appropriately, at DuPont's Experimental Station in Wilmington. Incyte is there because of a deal struck between DuPont and Incyte's chief executive officer, Paul A. Friedman, who headed R&D for DuPont Pharmaceuticals at the time of the sale to BMS.

After the sale was wrapped up, Friedman left to join what was then Incyte Genomics, a California-based genomics information company that had successfully navigated the turn-of-the-millennium genomics craze. Thanks to briefly lofty stock market valuations for such firms, Incyte had hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank but no sustainable business.

Friedman and Robert Stein, formerly executive vice president of research and preclinical development at DuPont Pharma, were charged with turning Incyte into a drug company, and one of their first acts was to hire Brian W. Metcalf, a respected organic chemist who had almost two decades of experience at SmithKline Beecham. At the time, he was at a small California-based biotech firm called Kosan Biosciences.

As Metcalf recalls, Friedman and Stein knew that change was afoot: "They had foreseen that DuPont Pharma could be downsized and that the opportunity for Incyte was to recruit a number of these experienced DuPont folks." In early 2002, Friedman lured several top former DuPont biologists to work in new laboratories leased from DuPont, and Metcalf convinced two celebrated DuPont pharmaceutical chemists, Wenqing Yao and Chu-Biao Xue, to come aboard as well.

For the next year, the former DuPont biologists attracted more biologists to Incyte, while Metcalf worked on recruiting chemists, mainly from outside DuPont. Then, after the Wilmington and Deepwater lab closures were announced, a second wave of DuPont chemists and biologists flowed into Incyte. Today, Metcalf says, Incyte employs roughly 140 scientists. About half are chemists, half are biologists, and two-thirds of them once worked at DuPont.

According to Metcalf, hiring experienced DuPont drug discovery scientists allowed the Incyte team to hit the ground running. "The infrastructure and the processes and the key personnel were transplanted from DuPont," he says. "A lot of biotech firms that hire out of academia really have to feel their way toward robust drug discovery. I didn't have to do this."

The sale of DuPont Pharmaceuticals was not the only trigger for the departure of talented scientists. DuPont, just like any large company, has always seen entrepreneurial men and women leave in order to make their own mark in the business world.

The largest company today at the Delaware Technology Park is Quest Pharmaceutical Services, which was launched in 1995 by Benjamin Chien, an analytical chemist who earned his Ph.D. in mass spectrometry from the University of Michigan and began his pharmaceutical career with DuPont Merck.

According to Chief Financial Officer T. Ben Hsu, QPS's sales have grown at double-digit rates almost since the firm's inception. Today, the company has 180 employees-160 in the U.S. and the rest at a facility in Taiwan-and annual sales in excess of $20 million.

Hsu figures that between 15 and 20% of QPS staffers once worked for DuPont, many having joined in the year after the pharmaceutical sale. "The BMS acquisition of DuPont Pharmaceuticals was pretty traumatic for many professionals and their families," he says.

Ex-DuPont scientists are particularly prevalent in QPS's management and include the directors of three of the firm's five businesses: Helen Shen, a pharmaceutical chemist, leads discovery and preclinical development; Eric Solon, a molecular biologist, heads QPS's autoradiography unit; and Bruce Aungst, a pharmaceutical scientist, directs discovery and preclinical development.

Former DuPonters, Hsu points out, come with what amounts to free prescreening: They have survived a big company's hiring process and have been solidly trained. Once aboard, however, he finds such people must be reminded of the importance of customer service and cost management. "Professionals used to a large-company work environment must be made keenly aware of these areas," Hsu says. "There is a mind-set adjustment to working in a small company."

Chien's QPS is a veteran of the technology park, but one of the newest firms there, 18-month-old Sepax Technologies, was also launched by a former DuPont scientist.

Xueying Huang, chief technology officer of Sepax and one of its cofounders, attended college at China's Nanjing University. He earned his Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of Delaware, where he focused on bioseparations, and completed a postdoc at Stanford University. He then joined DuPont and set to work developing combination nanoparticle-biologic materials for use in electronics and cosmetics.

After five years at DuPont's Central R&D labs, Huang decided he wanted to return to his academic roots and reach for the gold ring of biological separations: an efficient method of separating desirable proteins from whole cells. Huang submitted a proposal for his project at DuPont, but the company wasn't interested, so he decided to strike out on his own.

Sepax has grown quickly in its short life and now employs 15 full- and part-time people in Delaware and another 25 people in China. Customers include drug companies, universities, and even DuPont, which uses Sepax products to separate nanotubes, Huang says. Today, the company can separate out nanotubes of uniform length, and it is perfecting a technique for chiral separation of nanotubes.

Ironically, Huang has had to defer his pursuit of separation's gold ring. "You can't dream about science at a small company," he says. "Here, it's no R and only D. And if development looks like it will take more than six months, we don't even start."

Although Huang understands why big firms have the checks and balances that they have, he relishes operating on his own fast-paced timetable. "At DuPont, it took months to get a proposal reviewed and then more time to start a project," he says. "At a small company, if we want to do something, we can do it today."

The diaspora of DuPont researchers has created a network of people who started out as scientific colleagues and now are businesspeople who are comfortable doing business with each other.

For example, Sepax separates and purifies compounds for Athena Biotechnologies, a two-year-old natural products company based at DuPont's Stine-Haskell Research Center in Newark. Athena was started by Barry L. Marrs, a scientist who worked at DuPont's Central R&D lab in the 1980s.

Wilmington PharmaTech's Li says his firm has synthesized pharmaceutical chemicals for biotech and drug company customers that then send the compounds to QS Pharma for formulation. Wilmington also collaborates with QS on polymorph screening; at other times, Li recommends QS to customers that need formulation work.

At QPS, meanwhile, Hsu says his company uses Sepax chromatography columns in some of the analytical work it conducts on behalf of pharmaceutical companies. And Metcalf says that Incyte has hired Wilmington PharmaTech for process research, salt and polymorph screening, and cGMP synthesis of drug candidates.

Maurin attributes QS Pharma's success at least in part to business ties that have developed between its employees and other former DuPont Pharma staffers who dispersed after the sale to BMS. Many of them now work for smaller companies that are in need of the services that QS offers.

"A dandelion that has gone to seed-that's what happened to the scientific talent at DuPont Pharmaceuticals," Maurin says. "They scattered around the world and landed in lots of places. Many of them landed on their feet and are doing quite well."