Bonnie Baskin makes it sound so simple: A. You get an idea and start a company. B. You sell part of that company, and you start a second company. C. You grow that second company into one of the nation’s leading bioscience contract service providers.
Today, Baskin’s St. Paul-based AppTec Laboratory Services serves the biopharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical device/medical product industries as a one-stop shop for testing, research and development, and manufacturing. With labs in Atlanta and Philadelphia and 450 employees, Baskin says “Nobody has the platform of services that we have, nor are they able to serve as many different types of companies.” She estimates that her company has grown by 55 percent each year since 2004, “when we really started cooking.” Even better: She expects the outsourcing market to grow beyond $3 billion by 2010.
Did she have a grand plan when she began? A 5-, 10-, and 15-year vision? “Absolutely not!” she says. “I didn’t even know what a business plan was. I just saw the opportunity.”
According to Don Gerhardt, president of St. Louis Park–based LifeScience Alley: “It’s very hard to do what Bonnie has done. But she’s got passion, determination, brains—and she’s really good at what she does.”
Baskin started out as a scientist with no intention of becoming a businessperson. She brought a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of Miami and a postdoctoral fellowship with the National Institutes of Health to the University of Minnesota when she joined the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology’s virology lab in the summer of 1981.
Then she got a really good idea.
“I knew that the FDA had approved a drug, Acyclovir, for herpes. And I thought, ‘Gee, maybe clinics will now want to test to see if the virus is present—now that there’s a drug to treat it.’ ”
Turns out, Baskin was right. Investing her own money, she and two other women left the University to launch ViroMed, an outsource lab designed to test for a variety of infectious diseases. The start-up turned a profit within six months.
“We had a unique niche. There really was nobody doing that type of testing and there hadn’t been a big demand,” she says.
As science developed new products to treat such conditions as strep throat and flu, the clinical demand for lab services grew—and Baskin’s company was there to supply those services. As ViroMed grew into a national company, Baskin branched out to offer services to the medical device and biopharmaceuticals industries. In 1995, she bought a medical-device testing company in Atlanta and created a medical-device testing division at ViroMed’s St. Paul location; a few months later, she bought a Camden, N.J., company that tested biopharmaceuticals. By 2001, ViroMed was a $40-million business—and very salable. So Baskin sold the infectious-disease testing branch and turned her attention to the medical device/biopharmaceutical testing branch, renaming it AppTec. “I wanted a greater challenge,” she says. “I wanted a company that had the potential of being significantly larger.”
Baskin began her expansion by starting a contract manufacturing division. With a $14 million infusion of venture capital, Baskin built a $28 million, 75,000-square-foot facility in Philadelphia that manufactures biological pharmaceuticals in the smaller quantities needed by such customers as biotech start-ups, or huge corporations that need smaller quantities of product for clinical trials. Contract manufacturing now makes up 30 percent of revenue, but Baskin expects that number to grow and significantly outpace the testing portion of the business in the future.
Today, the company provides a wide range of routine and custom services—testing, research, and manufacturing for biopharmaceuticals, medical devices, and cell therapy and tissue-based products—for clients all over the world.
“I would not be a good person to run a company that doesn’t change,” says Baskin. “It’s fun and exciting to take a risk. It would be hard just to stop and watch Oprah every day—although once in a while sounds pretty good!”
