When recombinant DNA expert Herbert Boyer, Ph.D., first got a call from venture capitalist Robert Swanson about starting a company, the savvy scientist wasn’t sure a meeting would be worth his time.
“He said, ‘I'll meet you for 10 minutes.’ He had to be convinced to meet,” Ashley Magargee, now CEO of the pioneering biopharma organization that Boyer and Swanson founded, told Fierce on a recent tour of Genentech’s headquarters. “They met in this bar called Churchill's, and three hours later they had all these drawings on napkins.”
In the 50 years since Genentech’s now-mythic origins, biotechnology has progressed from a pie-in-the-sky idea to a mature industry flush with cash and awash in ideas. New startups seem to emerge just about every day; Genentech’s South San Francisco campus is surrounded by smaller companies, some of which—like Denali Therapeutics, Alumis and Alector—were founded by Genentech alums.
As the CEO of a half-century-old organization that bills itself as “the original biotech company” and is a key R&D engine for Roche, its parent company and one of the largest pharmaceutical outfits in the world, Magargee has heaps of responsibility resting on her shoulders. But, as she told Fierce, she tries to keep things casual.
“Be rigorous on the science, be rigorous on the innovation, but don't take yourself too seriously,” she said of Genentech’s culture. “Make sure it's a really collaborative, inclusive environment.”
While the scrappy startup has been on a long journey that included the $47 billion takeover by Roche in 2009, Magargee maintains that Genentech’s core identity remains intact. But recent significant changes to Genentech’s scientific leadership are a reminder that nothing stays the same forever.
The organization has seen a number of its experienced scientists depart over the last decade, most recently the high-profile exits of vice presidents Vishva Dixit, M.D., Man-Wah Tan, Ph.D., and Todd McDevitt, Ph.D., as part of a restructuring of the Genentech Research and Early Development (gRED) unit.
These changes have come under new gRED head Aviv Regev, Ph.D., a computational biologist who joined Genentech in 2020 and has been pushing a research framework based on an AI-powered “lab in a loop.”
“None of that identity part of Genentech is changing,” Magargee said when asked about the loss of scientific talent. “What is changing is the tools that our scientists can use.”
“It's complementing the great scientific prowess here, not replacing it, not changing it,” added Magargee, who was appointed CEO in 2024.
Genentech’s AI and lab automation strategy includes partnerships with chip-making giant Nvidia as well as Anthropic. The Anthropic collaboration has involved testing how the tech company’s AI agents can operate Genentech's BCA protein assay.
An interesting finding that came out of this testing was that the typical lab setup of horizontal benches—while necessary for a human to access equipment—may no longer be needed.
“Bench science has always been a left-to-right process,” Magargee told Fierce. “Lab benches have been horizontal for 100 years because the workflow goes that way,” she said. “How much of your lab footprint should be horizontal versus vertical is something that we're really working on.”
Genentech’s AI efforts are bolstered by its location. Nestled against the bay between San Francisco and Silicon Valley, the biotech pioneer has easy access to the tech titans currently at the forefront of this disruptive technology.
“We're so close to where the tech companies are doing innovation,” Magargee explained. “It's not AI just for AI's sake. It's: ‘Can you discover and develop the best medicine possible without spending a decade discovering the wrong medicine?’”
Breaking new ground
As Genentech fully embraces AI and automation, its iconic campus is getting a makeover to go along with it. Magargee is now overseeing a massive master plan to reshape the South San Francisco headquarters to better reflect the organization’s future.
“We have a generational campus vision plan, which is a master plan that looks out over the next 50 years,” Magargee told Fierce. A key facet of the plan’s first phase is to move scientists from the lower campus, close to the water, to a new central gRED center. Construction is slated to take place between 2027 and 2033.
The move is meant to improve connectivity and collaboration between researchers, the CEO said, and the full campus remodel is currently so open-ended that there isn’t even a set number of phases in the plan.
“Roche is just so great about this long-term view,” Magargee said. “They really encourage us to do everything in a very highly sustainable way as well.”
The campus shakeup is a key part of the $50 billion U.S. investment the Swiss drugmaker announced last year, around the same time a suite of other Big Pharmas pledged further commitments in the country after President Trump returned to the White House.
Roche's efforts also include opening a new Innovation Center in Boston, housed at Harvard’s Enterprise Research Campus. In a release announcing the center’s opening, Magargee said the location “places our scientists at the heart of one of the world’s most dynamic research communities, pairing deep expertise in disease biology with the power of AI and data science to accelerate discovery.”
Magargee acknowledged to Fierce that some aspect of the $50 billion figure is a repackaging of investments that were already in the works, “but then also we specifically decided we were going to make new investments as well into the U.S.”
“That's because of America's primacy in terms of scientific and manufacturing talent,” she added, “as well as making sure that we can have the most robust manufacturing and supply produced here for American patients.”
The campus radiates from a central hub that houses executive offices, including Magargee’s. Nearby, honeybees kept by Genentech employees—who call themselves gBees—buzzed among the flowers near a circular health and fitness center, shaped in homage to a doughnut shop that once stood on ground that was later swallowed by the expansion of the world’s first-ever biotech company.
It's not the only reminder of the organization's past. At the end of Fierce’s walk with Magargee, the CEO—who started her career with the biotech more than two decades ago in cancer market access—stopped near a famous statue of founders Boyer and Swanson, seated at a table in a bronze recreation of the meeting that started it all.
Genentech’s beginnings stemmed from Boyer’s work to engineer bacteria into insulin-producing factories, which ultimately led to the approval of Humulin—which was licensed to Eli Lilly—in 1982. But the biotech truly began setting itself apart with its blockbuster cancer antibodies Rituxan, Herceptin and Avastin, first approved in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Oncology remains an “anchor area” for Genentech, Magargee told Fierce, alongside hematology, neuroscience, immunology and ophthalmology. But she’s also determined to lead the organization into pastures new, like cardiovascular, renal and metabolic diseases.
“What works best is to really stay dedicated and focused in a disease area, to really understand the disease biology [and] build molecules that work exquisitely against them,” she said. That means investing in disease areas from “end-to-end,” from early research all the way to patients.
Though Genentech’s early history is in antibodies, the trio of assets that Magargee is particularly excited by includes a pair of small molecules that are currently sitting with the FDA.
One is the oral selective estrogen receptor degrader (SERD) drug giredestrant, which is expecting a decision from the agency by the end of November as an adjuvant treatment in HR+ early-stage breast cancer. Though the drug surprisingly failed a first-line trial in metastatic breast cancer back in March, Roche and Genentech still see mega-blockbuster potential.
Giredestrant’s name, Magargee pointed out, stems from the company’s gRED unit.
The other small molecule that Magargee is enthusiastic about is the BTK inhibitor fenebrutinib, which is being lined up for approval in multiple sclerosis but has also faced concerns about safety. Alongside those, the Genentech chief name-checked trontinemab, an antibody designed to cross the blood-brain barrier to treat Alzheimer’s disease.
“Neuroscience and Alzheimer's, as we know, is just really, really hard,” Magargee said. “This molecule looks like it has the real potential to change these clinical outcomes for patients that desperately need it.”
Magargee outlined these pipeline prospects while standing beneath a banner featuring a patient with lymphoma who was successfully treated by Genentech’s bispecific Columvi, first approved in 2023. The patient, Lamar, was critically ill before enrolling in a clinical trial of Columvi, Magargee explained, and his picture acts as a constant reminder for the organization’s scientists not to rest on their laurels.
“His big message is, ‘You have to push for urgency, because there are people like me that need to get on your clinical studies,’” Magargee told Fierce. “You have to push the science faster and faster.”