Untypical corporate boss provides fresh vision at Elan

The spectacular fall from grace of Ireland's largest company has propelledTurkish-born Armenian Garo Armen into the limelight, writes Jane O'Sullivan, Markets CorrespondentHis calm, measured tones and hisconfidence that Elan "can be fixed, and fixed right" have provided somesmall source of comfort to the company's bruised and battered shareholders

Six months ago very few people in Ireland had heard of Garo Armen. The chairman and chief executive of Antigenics, the publicly-quoted biotechnology company he co-founded in 1994, was known to his fellow directors on the Elan board. But beyond that small circle, and a handful of pharmaceutical industry analysts, his name meant little to most Irish people.

The spectacular fall from grace of Ireland's largest company has propelled the Turkish-born Armenian into the Irish limelight, however, and over the last five months he has become the person most closely associated with Elan's efforts to get back on track.

His calm, measured tones and his confidence that Elan "can be fixed, and fixed right" have provided some small source of comfort to the company's bruised and battered shareholders.

But why did Dr Armen, with a $300 million (€298 million) company of his own to run, agree to take on the mammoth task of trying to turn Elan around?

He admits, quite frankly, that he didn't realise fully just how tough a task lay ahead of him.

"Even though I realised it would be a big job I didn't realise the enormity of the job," he says.

Until the Elan board approached him, just two days before Mr Donal Geaney was deposed as chairman and chief executive last July, he says he had naively expected someone else to step forward.

They put it to him that he was the best qualified among them for the task and it would be detrimental to rush somebody else in from outside, and he agreed.

"I did it because of my moral obligation to all the constituents of Elan, which include shareholders, employees and the patients," he says.

Like a politician, he talks a lot of Elan's "constituents", not just its shareholders, and he sees the two companies with which he is involved in much broader terms than their profit and loss accounts.

But then, Dr Armen is not your typical corporate executive. Born in Istanbul to an Armenian family that survived the Turkish massacre of 1915, he emigrated to New York at his father's request.

The young Armen's growing sense of being a member of an oppressed minority, allied to the politically-charged atmosphere of the time, had caused his father to fear for the safety of his 17-year-old son.

So he arrived in the US in 1968 with no English and only distant relatives to lean on. He worked his way through college, getting a doctorate in physical chemistry and becoming a research fellow at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

In 1981, he left the world of research to become a Wall Street analyst, going on to work for Dean Witter Reynolds before setting up his own money management firm in 1990 to provide advisory services to the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry.

Among his clients at the time was a little known Irish company called Elan.

In 1993, he was approached by a scientist, Dr Pramod Srivastava, who was trying to develop a personalised cancer vaccine.

Dr Armen, whose own mother died of breast cancer at 47 despite his attempts to find treatments to help her, was so intrigued by Dr Srivastava's work that a year later the two co-founded Antigenics to develop those ideas. In the early years, he worked for the company - in which he holds a stake of around 40 per cent - for no pay.

He says that over many years working in the biotechnology sector, he had seen hundreds of cancer technologies, had been bombarded by them. "When Pramod's technology came to me," he says with a slight chuckle, "I saw the light. It was a revelation."

The approach is based on stimulating the immune system to respond to cancer cells and kill them. Antigenics is developing patient-specific vaccines, derived from the tumour after it has been removed, which work on the theory that each person's cancer has a unique signature.

Dr Armen is also very enthusiastic about Elan's Alzheimer's programme, which he describes as the most advanced in the world.

"People ask me how do I manage Antigenics and Elan? The reason I do it is because every morning I have the privilege of waking up and saying: 'I have two companies, one has the real opportunity of curing cancer, the other has the real opportunity of curing Alzheimer's'.

"How can you not get energised and excited by that? That's what drives me. It isn't money, it isn't fame, it is not the satisfaction of restructuring a troubled company, it is at the end of the day what we will build when the restructuring is over."

But he admits that running Elan, as well as Antigenics, has involved a punishing personal schedule and is not sustainable in the long term.

He spends a lot of time in the air, shuttling between his home in New York and Elan's offices in Boston, San Francisco and San Diego.

A typical day starts at around 5 a.m. and can finish as late as midnight.

"I keep my stamina up and my energy up. I jump rope fairly regularly to get my energy going and I take a deep breath once in a while and the job gets done."

To manage his heavy workload, he takes full advantage of technology and communications. He also says he has been blessed with very qualified senior management at both companies who don't require "much babysitting".

He places a lot of emphasis on efficiency and describes his management style as a "fairly open one", which cuts down on "a lot of nonsense and makes the process much more efficient".

"I discourage people, particularly within Elan, from engaging in politics. It is a waste of time and it becomes a very destructive force in managing things in a company and in dealing with people," he says, adding he operates an open-door policy.

He concedes that while Antigenics' shareholders have not expressed concern about his dual role to date, the company's board has raised the issue.

"They are concerned about me personally and how it may impact in the longer term and they expressed their desire to have this wind down."

That the company has now identified a candidate for the post of chief executive should allow Dr Armen to step back gradually from the running of Elan.

It will also give him more time for another recently-established project, a non-profit organisation called Children of Armenia which aims to provide education, healthcare and training to young people in the former Soviet republic.

He first visited his homeland only last year but says: "I have always been interested in the plight of the children."

His second son was adopted in 1993 after being brought from Armenia to the US for medical attention.

Severely cross-eyed, he had been found by a group of US doctors in an orphanage for mentally handicapped children.

But despite his other interests, Dr Armen has no plans to walk away from Elan just yet. After the new chief executive takes up his job, hopefully in early February, he envisages a short transition period.

But having devoted so much time and energy to the company, he plans to stick around to see how the recovery plan progresses.

"The job of the chairman has been offered by the board and I have told the board I will accept it for as long as they want me to remain chairman."