The Researcher's Best Friend

Clontech Founder Kenneth Fong, PhD '77, Has Used Molecular
Building Blocks To Structure His $50 Million Biotechnology Company

As a scientific investigator, Kenneth Fong, PhD '77, studied the molecular building blocks of human cells. As an entrepreneur, he used those substrates to build a major biotechnology company.

Dr. Fong's initial goal was to be a molecular biology researcher; DNA repair and cloning were his specialty. His doctoral thesis at IUSM, conducted under the watchful eye of advisor Richard Bockrath, PhD, professor of microbiology and immunology, concerned DNA repair in e-coli after UV radiation. Dr. Fong did post-doctoral studies at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), again concentrating in DNA cloning and sequencing. Then he moved on to the Research Triangle Park, N.C., as a senior staff fellow at the National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences, where he worked on cloning and regulation of testicular genes in rats.

He liked his job. He liked basic research. But Dr. Fong didn't think he excelled as a researcher. "You love to do research and you want to do it for life, but you have to ask yourself, 'How good am I?' I found out I was not as good as the fellow in the next lab," Dr. Fong says. "I was not as competitive, so I had to think about what I was really good at."

Dr. Fong said that as a researcher he got lots of requests for recombinant clones and other laboratory reagents he had created. "I did a good job creating the tools people wanted to have, so I thought my talent was in creating innovative tools instead of basic research."

From that introspection, Clontech was born. Clontech is Dr. Fong's privately held biotech company that supplies an assortment of genetic products to academic, pharmaceutical and biotechnical labs in the United States, Europe and Japan. The products are used by researchers to isolate and analyze genes. Among the genes that have been isolated using Clontech products are those for breast cancer, colon cancer, cystic fibrosis, and combined deafness and blindness. A recent product called cDNA Microarray has been used to profile differential gene expression in normal and disease tissues.

Dr. Fong started the company using his research credentials, three hundred square feet of lab space on loan from his brother's water testing company, and a personal loan of $35,000 for startup capital. Within one year, he had hired his first employee.

Today Clontech is a $50 million company with more than three hundred employees, about sixty of whom are PhDs. It is the fourth largest firm of its kind and the largest molecular biology company founded by an Asian American in the U.S. And it continues to grow by leaps and bounds. Dr. Fong said Clontech maintains an annual growth rate of thirty-five percent.

The company's first successful product was the lambda gt 11 cloning system for screening for new genes, co-developed with Stanford University researcher Richard Young, PhD, who now teaches at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Part of Dr. Fong's contribution was to move the product from the research lab into the commercial production arena. The product's success propelled the company from a start-up to a position of respect in the biotech industry.

Clontech, whose advertising tagline is "innovative tools to accelerate discovery," has been recognized nationally for its achievements. In 1996, 1997 and 1998, the company received R&D 100 Awards for commercializing five innovative products. It also was recently recognized by the San Francisco and San Jose business journals as one of the hundred fastest growing companies in the Bay Area.

Located in Palo Alto, Cali-fornia, Clontech has opened subsidiaries in Heidelberg, Germany; Basingstoke, United Kingdom; and Tokyo, Japan. The company has twenty-three distributors in Europe, Asia, Australia and South America.

But Kenneth Fong is not all business. A portion of his leisure time is filled with civic and philanthropic responsibilities; he is active in several professional societies, such as serving as a board member of the Analytical and Life Sciences Systems Association and on the advisory board of San Francisco State University where he has been recognized as a Hall of Fame alumnus. He also is active politically. On the personal front, Dr. Fong is married to Pamela Fong, an optometrist. They have two children, sixteen-year-old John and five-year-old Maggie.