Taking charge of bio-campus too good to pass up

It may have been the early mornings Mr Reg Shaw spent bisecting dogfish as a second-year student at UCG that dictated the course of his future career. It certainly was not the two years he spent working for ACCBank or the ESB after he left school.

But today the world's largest integrated bio-pharmaceutical campus is under construction in Clondalkin, Co Dublin, and he is managing director of the company which is developing it, Wyeth BioPharma.

It is also the biggest construction project in the State at present, apart from roads.

Wyeth is one of the US's largest pharmaceutical groups, producing products such as Anadin, Advil and Robitussin, as well as oral contraceptives and HRT products. And it is investing £1 billion in the project at Grange Castle International Business Park, which will employ 1,300 people, 60 per cent of them graduates, when in full production.

That will not be until 2005: the construction will continue for another two years and it will then take about 20 months to validate it.

"The nature of the technology dictates very rigorous commissioning and testing of the facility to produce the products because they are highly regulated and have to be approved by the US FDA, the EMEA in Europe and the Irish Medical Board," Mr Shaw explains.

Meanwhile, he will be busy recruiting management and workers.

"We have most of the senior management group recruited and we're now commencing a fairly major recruitment for a number of the specialist positions," he says. "About 60 per cent of the them will have scientific backgrounds, ranging across a whole range of disciplines - chemical engineers, chemists, biologists, virologists, microbiologists - all the ologists except zoologists."

The three main products which will be produced are Enbrel, a new drug for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis, a vaccine for meningitis/pneumonia in young children and NMP2, a drug which induces bone growth.

Enbrel has been greeted as a wonder drug for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis. "I can't make any claims about products publicly," Mr Shaw said.

"In the States, if you talk about a product, you also legally have to talk about the side effects of products so that is why they are particularly fussy about what they state about products.

"It's the first advance in 20 years for the treatment of moderately and severely active rheumatoid arthritis in adult and juvenile patients. Enbrel is severely supply constrained. We could sell more product and more patients would benefit is we could supply more product."

Reg Shaw didn't start out as a scientist. After school at Ennis CBS - and the ACC and ESB, he joined De Beers in Shannon, from where he got a scholarship to what is now NUI Galway to study chemistry and did his PhD in physical chemistry on the adsorption phenomena of gases in synthetic zeolites.

For simpletons, synthetic zeolites are the things which increase the octane rating in petrol, among other useful processes.

About that time, SmithKline Beecham set up one of the earliest pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities here, in Cork, and with his new wife, Mary, Reg Shaw set up home in Cork. Over the next 27 years, he progressed to become world vice-president of supply for the company.

This included periods when he commuted to Philadelphia and later to London. But the Shaws never left Cork. "After 27 years, we have taken out citizenship papers."

Not so their two sons. Wesley, who is 23, is working with a law firm in San Francisco, having graduated from the University of Limerick, while Robert, who has just graduated from Georgetown University in Washington in English and Spanish, is working as a cub reporter on the Buenos Aires Herald in Argentina.

But the years of living out of a suitcase got to him and he retired early, in 1999. So what is he doing setting up the biggest integrated bio-pharmaceutical campus in the world? "It was too good an opportunity to pass up," he says simply.

Wyeth has a significant presence in the biotechnology area, but Mr Shaw says he has no concerns about biotechnology.

"The opposite. If you look at the products, they provide benefits to patients who are seriously ill. I think it's one of the great pluses of the industry and it will continue to be a big driver in the growth of the industry. We are such a high-tech end of the business that the products are so researched and so regulated that I have no concerns."

It is because of this high level of regulation that some of their products are so expensive and £1 billion facilities are required for their production. "Hopefully, they will be profitable products. It's a high risk business in terms of what you invest in R&D and how successful you are with commercial products."

The bone growth product is a classic example of a new area biotechnology is helping, he says. So too is a hoped for treatment for Alzheimer's disease on which Wyeth and Elan are collaborating.

The Grange Castle Industrial Park is a 500-acre park owned by South Dublin County Council and marketed by South Dublin County Council and IDA Ireland. Wyeth have 90 acres of it.

The company decided on Ireland for this development, Mr Shaw says, for a number of reasons. "We have a very long and I guess positive association with this country. (They employ nearly 2,000 people in Newbridge, Limerick, Sligo and Dublin). I think obviously the skills base, educational background of people in the country would be a very significant factor again in why we located here. Obviously the financial benefits we would enjoy from operating here - corporation tax arrangements - would be a factor high in the equation.

"I think the infrastructure we were able to avail of in South Dublin would be a prime determinant in deciding to locate where we located and the reaction and response we received from the local council, community and business community has been outstanding."

When not working and commuting, as he still does, to Cork, Mr Shaw golfs - "I am more on the soil-sampling side of golfing", he says, apparently untruly. He is also a keen photographer and former president of the UCG Photographic Society and enjoy reads history, science-based, space-related and archaeology books.

Which brings him back to Grange Castle and the site where Wyeth BioPharma has located. Having studied archaeology for a year in college, he has taken a keen interest in the archaeological dig carried out on the site under the direction of Duchas.

"We found small items of historical significance: shards of medieval period pottery, some beads, also a ring barrow, a pre-Christian burial site. In this particular one there was a mixture of animal and human bones.

"Part of the site goes back to Viking times. And there are the ruins of an old castle, probably hard to date but probably somewhere in the 1500s, more a tower house, which was occupied until the late 1970s.

The council has extensive plans for the area, potentially including the castle, as a feature of the development, " he adds, and you can feel he is going to pay a lot of attention to that development, as well as to the development of Wyeth BioPharma.