14 May 2008
Nancy Chang, Taiwanese-Born Co-Founder of Tanox
Immigrant entrepreneur profile
“If you really believe in something, the best approach is to invest yourself in that idea,” said Nancy Chang, co-founder of Tanox, a biotechnology company based in Houston, Texas, with almost 200 employees and nearly $45 million in revenue last year.
Not many people take undergraduate classes from one professor who is a future Nobel Prize winner (Yuan T. Lee) and another who would go on to become the nation’s prime minister. Nancy says her good fortune to learn under these inspiring teachers gave her the courage to leave Taiwan and study at Brown in 1974, barely able to speak English. On the plane ride to the United States, she read James Watson’s book on the discovery of the double helix, which led to changing her academic focus to biology, even though she had never taken a course on the subject.
The following year, Nancy became one of the first international students to attend Harvard Medical School and later, she was told, became the medical school’s first major entrepreneur. After Harvard, she was hired at Hoffman-La Roche on a work visa and later became director of the molecular biology group for Centocor. She also has taught at the Baylor College of Medicine and holds seven patents.
In 1986, Nancy co-founded Tanox and served as chief executive officer from 1990 to 2006. Starting Tanox was “part passion and dream and went against the textbook” by developing an asthma drug that focused on the allergy-related basis of asthma. At the time, this ran counter to the central belief in how asthma operated. The perseverance paid off when in June 2003, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Xolair, the first biotech product cleared for treating those with asthma related to allergies. Xolair was developed under an agreement among Tanox, Inc., Genentech, Inc., and Novartis Pharma AG.
When Tanox went public in April 2000, it raised $244 million, which at the time was the largest biotech initial public offering.
Currently, Tanox is developing TNX-355, an antibody for the treatment of HIV/AIDS. The company is in discussions with the FDA regarding clinical trials. Nancy, who is now chairman of Tanox’s board of directors, said she is passionate about AIDS, since as a young researcher she worked in one of the first laboratories to confront the disease.
“I came to the United States frightened and scared. But I found if you do well and if you have a dream, you will find people in America willing to help and give you an opportunity,” said Nancy. “Life is very rich. I just love this country.”
The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.
Note: This profile originally appeared in the study American Made: The Impact of Immigrant Entrepreneurs and Professionals on U.S. Competitiveness, which was commissioned by the National Venture Capital Association and conducted by Stuart Anderson of the National Foundation for American Policy and Michaela Platzer of Content First LLC.
