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Google Search for "Work-Life Balance"
At the Intersection of Need, Science and Market
How Oats, Peas, Beans and Barley Grow
Brain Studies Yield Clues to Desire and Motivation
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At the Intersection of Need, Science and Market
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Barbara Fox '78 |
The restlessness that marked the academic career Barbara Fox ’78 believed she was destined for was not a sign of "a short attention span," as she originally thought. Instead, it was a growing desire to be an entrepreneur — to start up new companies rather than join established academic programs, and to pursue applied drug discovery instead of advancing basic research. That desire ultimately led Fox to leave the academy for industry.
"My father still says, 'I can’t believe I have a daughter who reads the Wall Street Journal,’" she says.
Starting Out
After earning her bachelor’s in chemistry from Bryn Mawr, Fox embarked upon what she assumed would be a decades-long march through academia — doctorate, post-doctoral fellowship, faculty appointment, teaching, research, publishing, tenure, more teaching, research and publishing. After working as a lab technician at Rockefeller University, Fox moved on to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry in 1983.
"But I decided early on that I didn’t want to dedicate my life and career to doing bio-organic chemistry," Fox recalls. "I just didn’t have enough interest to fully appreciate the wonders of enzymes and make an impact in the field. I was looking for something with a broader application."
To widen her horizons, Fox accepted a postdoctoral fellowship in cellular immunology at the National Institutes of Health. In her four years at NIH, she "learned a lot of biology really fast." She joined the faculty at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in 1987 and rose to the rank of associate professor. For seven years Fox worked her way up the ladder, earning tenure and landing grants.
Yet she realized she still did not especially enjoy what she was doing. "I didn’t take to academic science.
I didn’t like the grant pressures, and I didn’t think I was doing anything particularly important," Fox says. "When I was approached by a recruiter to consider a private-sector job in the Boston area, I jumped at it."
Starting Up
That opportunity was at ImmuLogic Pharmaceutical Corp., a Massachusetts biotech firm that was exploring immunology-based drug therapies. In 1993 Fox came aboard as senior scientist, and was rapidly promoted to vice president of discovery research.
"After leaving academia, I discovered that one can do all sorts of different things and have the freedom to move in all sorts of different directions," she says. "I had a better personality fit with industry. I like applied science — and the challenge of figuring out how to translate basic science into a useful, marketable product. I love the breadth of responsibilities you take on and the new skills you learn. You’re not tied to the preliminary data you’ve generated for 15 years. You can jump into new areas."
Five years after Fox joined ImmuLogic, the firm’s lead programs in allergy ran into problems and the company foundered. Instead of returning to the relative security of academia, Fox made the bold choice to leverage the business knowledge she acquired at ImmuLogic to start up her own company, despite "total naiveté of how hard that that could be!" She founded Addiction Therapies in 1998 (later renamed Recovery Pharmaceuticals) and assumed the roles of president and chief scientific officer. But after five years, funding dried up, and her first venture failed.
Fox then started working with Oxford BioScience Partners, a Boston firm that provides venture capital and management assistance to emerging life sciences companies, where she evaluated investment opportunities. She also was a corporate development consultant at Ensemble Discovery Corp., a Cambridge, Mass., firm that develops novel classes of therapeutics and bioassays. With a solid grounding in venture-capital funding and corporate development, Fox was better prepared to once again start up her own company.
Starting Over
In 2005 Fox launched Avaxia Biologics, an antibody company ("I’m going back to my immunology roots," she says) still in its very early stages. Avaxia is applying for funding and building its staff, and the uncertainty surrounding its future is not something that bothers Fox in the least as chief executive officer.
"You have to be totally optimistic whether you can get it to work," she says, "but it’s still up in the air whether we can pull it off — which is the state I love the most."
Fox started Avaxia with the aim of developing influenza therapeutics, but found that there was little venture-capital interest in that business model. So she has switched the firm’s focus to treatments for gastrointestinal diseases — in particular celiac disease, an autoimmune disorder of the small bowel that interferes with the absorption of nutrients from food, which afflicts an estimated 1 in 130 people in the United States. She’s continuing to pursue leads on flu grants, but the GI focus allows her to combine market interest, technology and science in a way that addresses a medical condition in need of treatment.
"It’s not just market-driven," Fox says. "There’s a need. It’s not like making drugs for male-pattern baldness, which I’m sure some people consider a real need. I’m very gratified to be working on celiac disease. If you can find the intersection between where there’s a need, where there’s good science and where there’s a market, then you have the opportunity to create something worthwhile."
Tom Durso writes about science, health care and business for a variety of publications, including the Philadelphia Business Journal and Family Business magazine.