So, This Is What a Biotech Tycoon Looks Like
Certainly, scouring the world for placentas wasn't cheap, and neither was the Allston facility or the decade of trials Genzyme had to go through to get FDA approval for the drug. And the narrative of those struggles is helpful in deflecting cost-gouging claims. But Genzyme has by now recouped the investment it made in those lean years, right? Answering criticism in the mid-'90s, Termeer suggested to the Times that the cost would soon drop. "Once we have the new plant running and approved, we will start to see some economies of scale," Termeer told the paper in 1994. "We can start to pass on some of these economies to the marketplace while at the same time improving the financial results of the company." Fourteen years later, the price of Cerezyme has never come down.
Also true is that Genzyme's billion-dollar-a-year golden goose was created in part with taxpayer dollars. But the government scientists who first tested the therapy say that's how it's supposed to work. "The NIH sponsors research that enters the public domain," says Dr. John Barranger, who helped invent the therapy and now consults for Genzyme. "Henri Termeer was the only person who cared to take this up—he should be given credit for that. He was advised not to do this. Powerful scientists told him not to do this. They said, ‘Look, this rare disease will never make any money, don't do this.' Henri is of course a businessman, and you can't be successful if you're cavalier. But this therapy, he believed, was the right thing. Did it end up making a business? Sure it did." And that's not something Termeer feels he needs to apologize for.
The biotech tycoon doesn't like things too easy. Take his boat, a 36-foot Hinckley Pilot built in Maine a half-century ago, one of only 117 ever made. The vessel is sturdy and heavy and hard to sail, and far from the fancy, computer-driven yachts so popular with the typical business titan. Though his home on Marblehead Neck is but a pitching wedge away from the Corinthian Yacht Club, Termeer's boat isn't one of the hundreds of sailboats anchored there. Instead, he keeps it in Maine, docked near the new home he's built outside Kennebunkport, where he pilots it through the shoals and shallows of the inhospitable coastline. There are, for sure, easier places to steer one's boat, safer spots for smoother sailing if you're into that sort of thing. His wife, Belinda, likes to tell the story of a luckless afternoon several years ago when Termeer got his vessel a little too close to shore and ran aground in the muck. With the tide seeping out to sea, Termeer stood on the slanted deck of his boat as it fell onto its side. "Eventually we were found," he says quietly. "More like rescued," says Belinda.
The image of Termeer staying put, learning something from the experience, it's not dissimilar from what he's done with Genzyme. Rather than shirk from the criticism engendered by Cerezyme, Termeer has embraced its model and brought to market three other ultraexpensive drugs, called Fabrazyme, Aldurazyme, and Myozyme, to treat three other ultrarare enzyme disorders. On this cornerstone of unlikely cash cows, Genzyme has further set itself apart by becoming more than just a drug company. A lot of biotech companies focus deeply on one or two areas of research; Genzyme, however, sprinkles its ambitions (and thus also its risks) into six different business units that can appear awkwardly pieced together. In addition to the rare-disease drugs, the company sells compounds for medical testing, and miscellany like therapies for kidney ailments, joint lubrication, and transplant rejection. "If you look at what they do, I don't think anybody would logically group some of those things together," the former Genzyme executive says. "It looks very scattershot."
Building such a diversified business has been a matter of merger for Genzyme, which has acquired 29 other companies since 1991—an impressive haul in an industry where the next-most-acquisitive biotech firm, Amgen, has completed eight such deals. Two years ago, Termeer launched a hostile takeover attempt of a Canadian drug company called AnorMed, which, when the move was announced, spurred another Kendall Square firm, Millennium Pharmaceuticals, to make a higher bid.
By the cordial standards of the industry, his aggressive play for AnorMed was considered taboo. Onlookers dubbed the bidding war the "Battle of Boston," heralding it as proof both of the growing stakes in the business of science and of Termeer's proclivity to get what he wants. In the days after being outbid by Termeer, Millennium CEO Deborah Dunsire gave a hint of the enmity that festered over the incident. Quoted in the Globe, she claimed a Pyrrhic victory in at least driving up the eventual cost to Genzyme—which she wouldn't even deign to refer to by name, instead calling it "the other Cambridge firm." Today, Millennium is itself in the process of being bought out by a Japanese firm.
