The Elements of Service

My name is a combination of two chemical elements in the periodic table—Ge for germanium, Li for lithium,” Ge Li jokes. “So I was always destined for a career in chemistry and related fields.”
That destiny was fulfilled. Interested in science from an early age—both his parents worked at the Chinese Academy of Sciences—Li studied chemistry at the prestigious Peking University. After graduating in 1989, he went to New York City to undertake a Ph.D., working on combinatorial chemistry at Columbia University, where his professor and mentor was W. Clark Still. “He remains a close friend,” says Li. “I was fortunate to be involved in his work on encoded combinatorial synthesis and joined Pharmacopeia, the company that he founded to commercialize and develop this technology, in 1993.” Pharmacopeia became a subsidiary of Ligand Pharmaceuticals in 2008.

By the late 1990s, Li had figured out that China could be the next big thing in chemistry services. “Looking at the country’s vast talent in the physical sciences, including chemistry, and also at the low cost of operation at the time, I realized that this was a real possibility,” he explains. “So, with my family’s support, and along with three friends—Xiaozhong Liu, Tao Lin and Zhaohui Zhang—I cofounded WuXi PharmaTech in December 2000. Our business model was to provide synthetic chemistry services to pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies in Shanghai and the surrounding area.” Li was appointed CEO and chairman of the board. “My early career at Pharmacopeia had given me a great opportunity to learn how to build an entrepreneurial company and to use technology to benefit pharmaceutical and biotech partners,” Li says. “Also, I had been focused on chemistry beforehand, so Pharmacopeia introduced me to the meaning and importance of developing new medicines and treatments for patients in need.”

Starting with a single 7,000-square-foot laboratory in 2001, the company now occupies more than two million square feet of laboratory and manufacturing space. In 2008, WuXi PharmaTech bought St. Paul, Minnesota–based AppTec Laboratory Services for about $160 million. Based on this purchase, Li says, “Very few companies have such broad service capabilities and that gives us a competitive edge.” The new company, WuXi AppTec, provides discovery and development for pharmaceuticals, development and testing for biotherapeutics and medical devices, toxicology services, manufacturing for active pharmaceutical ingredients, cell banking, and cGMP (current Good Manufacturing Practice) for cellular therapeutics. By 2010 the company had grown to 4,500 employees, with revenues in excess of $330 million.

In deconstructing his success at WuXi, Li cites knowledge, the preparation that his training provided, a determination to seize the opportunity when it came along, the trust of his customers and support of his family and friends, his belief in creating value for society, as well as some luck. His hunch, if all of this can be summarized as such, paid off spectacularly.

Last year, Li nearly signed a deal to unite WuXi AppTec with Charles River Laboratories, a move that would have offered a still broader portfolio of capabilities. However, shareholders at Charles River rejected the proposal. At the time, Li wrote that he was “disappointed that the transaction was terminated, because we could have provided a more complete and in-depth service sooner.” But the company’s goal has remained unchanged. His objective is to “improve the success of research and shorten the time of development by offering customers world-class capabilities and unparalleled capacities.” Describing his motivation, Li says, “There are many unmet medical needs. In many cases the fate of a patient is binary: with the drug, live; without the drug, die.”

Li’s is a satisfying job. “What I enjoy most is when WuXi’s services provide our clients with real value, speeding up a potential new cure for disease,” he says. “Whether it’s an innovative company or a service company, we ultimately all work on serving patients.” Yet Li is frustrated with the low number of new drugs coming to the market. “As a corporate citizen of the industry,” he declares, “I feel that we all need to think of better, more efficient and cost effective ways to discover and develop drugs for patients.”