Andre Pernet, president, Quark Biotech, Fremont, California

Andre Pernet had a dual education in science and business. The biochemist, who last year took over as president of Quark Biotech in Fremont, California, earned his MBA and PhD more or less at the same time. Since then he has put his skills to good use, carving a career path that has taken him from the lab bench to the corporate boardroom.

Most of this transition took place at Abbott Laboratories in Montreal, Canada, and Chicago, Illinois, where he worked for 26 years. But his abilities — and his mettle — were tested when he became chief executive of Genset, a French biotech firm near Paris.

When he arrived in 2000, he found a company that had several divisions doing interesting science. But the goals of many of these sections bore scant resemblance to the core technology of the company of gene and protein identification. As Genset had yet to bring a product to market, the company was losing money. (see CV)

To turn the situation around, Pernet sought buyers for those interesting but unprofitable components. “In the end we had a company that was coherent and had a lower cash-burn rate,” he says.

But that experience was double-edged. “Being able to transform the company into something that is viable and successful is the most exciting part of the job,” Pernet says. But it also meant laying off people, a process that Pernet describes as “not so fun — but you've got to do it”.

Pernet says that being involved in different phases of drug development has taught him how the whole business works. In his early years at Abbott, his main goal was to create chemicals with different but specific properties. As he rose through the ranks there, he learned how to manage the increased complexity of trials that involve human subjects.

And first at Genset and now at Quark, he says that communication skills are most important — how to get diverse teams of people to talk about basic and clinical problems with the aim of achieving specific business goals.

Quark is currently making a loss, but Pernet hopes that, with good communication skills, he can help turn it into a profitable company. The business lessons he learned at Genset should make that transformation easier for him.