It could have been a somber event. Snow, ice and layoffs were looming.

The room was buzzing with more than 300 men and women who were losing their high-level research jobs at global pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline.

They were among the 900 Research Triangle Park-based chemists, engineers, biologists, clinical development scientists, statisticians, and other managerial, technical and support personnel notified last December that GSK was eliminating their jobs.

At the time, GSK said 450 to 500 of the laid-off workers would be offered jobs in a dedicated GSK business unit within Parexel, providing a variety of clinical development services primarily from the RTP area. So people taking those jobs wouldn’t have to move, even though the parent company, Parexel International Corp. is a global biopharmaceutical services company.

On the night of an approaching winter storm, the threat was not enough to keep this group from coming together to peer through fear and uncertainty and see what options and opportunity might look like through the lens of entrepreneurship.

The gathering was organized by the North Carolina Biotechnology Center’s Rob Lindberg, Ph.D., RAC, senior director of NCBiotech’s technology transfer & entrepreneur programs. As a trained scientist and experienced business builder, Lindberg lives and breathes their world every day.

He billed the event as “Life Beyond GSK: Entrepreneurial Career Options.” GSK officials wholeheartedly supported the program idea, offering the auditorium, assisting with the planning and including their own transition specialists, such as Michael Dombeck, director of GSK R&D strategy development, who shared the moderator job with Lindberg.

Lindberg and other NCBiotech professionals routinely provide free employment support programs to hundreds of life science specialists, including a monthly Jobs Network series and a more entrepreneur-focused program called theEntrepreneurship Essentials seminars. (See the sidebar for more about upcoming meetings of each).

Some in the recent GSK audience had been settled into their labs for only a few months. Others had spent decades at their offices and benches. Now they were face-to-face with hope and success, personified by former GSK workers who stayed in the Research Triangle area after parting ways with the corporate behemoth, finding rejuvenation and redefinition in small-business ways.

“There is life beyond GSK,” assured Robert Ingram in a welcoming introduction to the group settling into seats in the Building 5 auditorium on GSK’s sprawling RTP campus. “I’m testament to that – a failed retiree.”

Many in the crowd chuckled at the wink from the former chairman and CEO of GlaxoWellcome, predecessor to GSK. Many had worked under his leadership.

Ingram, now a general partner at the local venture capital firm Hatteras Venture Partners, kicked off the event with the admonition that those who choose to become entrepreneurs should be realistic about their expectations.

“Don’t do it for the money,” said Ingram. “Do it because you believe in your mission.”

June Almenoff, M.D., Ph.D., works with Ingram as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Hatteras Venture Partners. She said she came to North Carolina to join the medical school faculty at Duke University, then took a “safe” job in drug safety research at GSK.

“I was allowed to be entrepreneurial, she told the audience. “If you look back at some of your initiatives, you probably were too.” She encouraged the participants to use any such experience as a resource if entrepreneurship beckons.

Almenoff left GSK after 12 years to become CEO of Furiex, a small Morrisville drug company started by PPD founder Fred Eshelman. Furiex was purchased in April 2014 by Forest Labs in a deal approaching $1.5 billion.

Most life science startups don’t end that well, Almenoff and other panelists noted. But entrepreneurs willing and able to take risks, and with the right products, business skills, mentors and employees, can find many rewards in starting a business.

“It’s like a country song, ‘Life tests you first, and teaches you later,’” said Almenoff.

Panelist Ronald Fleming, Pharm.D., is senior director of oncology clinical development at GSK. Though his job isn’t among those being eliminated, he brought the perspective of a professional with experience relevant to the discussion.

A former Wake Forest University faculty member, Fleming joined Glaxo Wellcome in late 1999, three months before the SmithKline Beecham merger. So he used the severance package he was offered and in 2001 started Kucera Pharmaceuticals with other WFU scientists. The HIV drug the company was trying to develop eventually failed in animal models, the company folded and Fleming joined GSK.

“Battle has a way of focusing the mind,” Fleming told the crowd. “If you’re going to have a successful startup there’s got to be a need for your idea, you need patent protection, a good leadership team, and funding – the life of a small company. And you have to be able to accept setbacks, and get up and do it again.”

Fleming said Lindberg and NCBiotech “provided our company fantastic support” with both funding and connecting the company leadership with important contacts.

“In the end, our HIV compound didn’t work out,” he said, “but the four years I spent doing that were the best.”

Moise Khayrallah, Ph.D., left Glaxo Wellcome in 1996, a year after the merger creating that iteration of the company. “It was evident after that merger that I wanted to be in a small pond,” he said.

After a couple of years in Los Angeles, Khayrallah returned to the Triangle “because I love it here.” He ended up joining with a group of savvy business partners who agreed to form small virtual pharmaceutical companies that could “make quick hits by bringing compounds to market fast.”

“It came down to what I’d be happy doing 24 hours a day,” he said. Khayrallah is now the CEO of Morrisville-based Aerial BioPharma, but he and his colleagues built and sold their two previous companies, Avonex and Neuronex, in quick succession.

“Failure is inevitable,” warned Michael Stocum, a Glaxo Wellcome alumnus who is now president and founder of Raleigh-based Personalized Medicine Partners. “But venture groups want to know how you learn from failure.” He also advised the audience to “work with fear, and network.”

Christy Shaffer, Ph.D., said she was first in line to take a voluntary severance package when she left Burroughs Wellcome after the merger with Glaxo, and in 1995 became the first full-time employee of Durham’s Inspire Pharmaceuticals. Three years later she “got pushed into becoming a CEO of Inspire Pharmaceuticals when I wasn’t planning to be,” and stepped down 11 years later. She said she’s not a venture capitalist, even though she’s now also with Hatteras. “I’m an entrepreneur who works with a venture firm.”

“Show a passion that you believe you have a solution to a problem,” she advised those considering entrepreneurship.

Rik Vandevenne, principal at River Cities Capital Funds, was the only panelist without a history as a GSK employee. He said he came to the Triangle to attend business school at Duke, then went to work in venture funding.

“At the end of the day it’s all about the people,” he advised. “Hopefully most of you will be staying here in the Triangle. Because as an outsider, I say to myself, ‘Wow! These talented people have so many opportunities.”

Note: Veteran journalist Jim Shamp is director of public relations for the N.C. Biotechnology Center.

(C) NC Biotech Center