He’s Flying High In Biotech

Physician turned entrepreneur Richard Davis enjoys success with startups

By Jim Raper

Rick Davis was going to be an astronaut. As a boy in Florida, spending his formative years within a couple hours’ drive from Cape Kennedy, he built a fort high in a tree and dreamed of liftoff. He prepared for the rigors of NASA’s space-flight program by making excellent grades, by qualifying as a National Merit Scholar, by playing seven sports at Clearwater High School. His classmates took note of his determination and voted him “most ambitious.” If Rick Davis said he was going to be an astronaut, you believed him.

But we know what they say about best-laid plans.

When Davis says today, “I’m amazed by how much of it has come from being in the right place at the right time,” he is speaking not so much about good luck as he is about chance. Unexpected things happen. In the end, we are judged by how well we improvise.

So it has come to be – 30 years since he graduated from Old Dominion – that Richard C. Davis ’77 is no astronaut. He is a biotechnology entrepreneur who has founded and led six startup companies, four of which he has sold. Along the way he has raised nearly $100 million in capital. He has been a consultant to numerous biotechnological and pharmaceutical companies. His innovations with crutches, hospital room equipment, pharmaceuticals, laboratory devices and medical technologies have garnered dozens of patents and trademarks. (The total reaches more than 200 if we count those applied for as well as those awarded and issued.)

Davis has an office and home in northern California, near Sacramento, and a satellite office and home in Florida. His wife Lior, is a successful lawyer and the couple have two children. “It’s a good life,” he says matter-of-factly. Again, when he says it, you believe him. But you still wonder about his aspirations to be an astronaut, and how it came to be that he changed career courses.

“Well, just before college – I had a full scholarship to go to Vanderbilt – I took a motorcycle trip and ended up having an accident in Virginia Beach,” he says. “I was going 65 miles per hour near Newtown Road on the Virginia Beach Expressway and a lady ran me off the road.” The spill broke his collarbone, left arm, ribs and pelvis. Doctors were cautious enough about his condition to keep him for 10 days in the intensive care unit of a Norfolk hospital.

Davis had family in Virginia Beach and he stayed with them to recuperate. He put off going to Vanderbilt, and decided to go to ODU for a semester or two to study engineering. At this point, he still was determined to become an astronaut.

Two semesters led to three, and before he knew it, he had graduated magna cum laude in chemistry. “I enjoyed the experience at ODU,” he said.

But why the turn to chemistry? “A couple of reasons,” he explains. “I think predominantly, it was the accident. I had spent so much time in the hospital and in therapy, I became interested in medicine. Also, about then the manned space flight program was defunded. I switched from engineering to chemistry.”

Davis got a taste for research working in the lab of Frank Scully, professor of chemistry, and a boyhood tendency to “tinker with things” led to his invention of a bench clamp for flasks. He says this was a case of necessity being the mother of invention. “I was one of the clumsier chemistry students, always knocking things over.” This first brush with biotechnology proved profitable: Davis sold the clamp design to a national company.

Also while he was at ODU his entrepreneurship blossomed into a home repair business he called Handi-Man of Virginia. He got a contractor’s license, and by the time he pulled up stakes to go to medical school in Richmond, he had eight men working for him.

Another invention followed during Davis’ student years at the Medical College of Virginia, where he earned his M.D. in 1981. He developed a type of spine stabilizer, sold the design, and has watched it become a standard-of-care device throughout the world.

In 1982, Davis completed a surgical internship focusing on emergency medicine and orthopedics at the Naval Medical Center Portsmouth, and during a Navy stint in Pensacola from 1983-86 he served in the dual position – rare in the Navy – of flight surgeon and diving undersea medical officer.

At Pensacola, his dream to become an astronaut seized him again and he moved through the first two stages of a three-part qualification program. But NASA’s moratorium on shuttle flights after the Challenger disaster in January 1986, coupled with Davis’ “unquenchable interest in emerging biomedical technology businesses,” as he phrased it in a personal statement, persuaded him to leave the Navy. He was honorably discharged as a lieutenant commander, having won two commendations from the secretary of the Navy for his innovations in medicine.

Almost immediately after Davis became a civilian emergency physician, he began to prepare for his first business venture. “I started to have different ideas, such as about tools I needed, but didn’t have. I developed them myself. After a few years of getting patents, friends encouraged me to start a business.” He founded Code Blue Medical Corp., which designed and produced therapeutic medical devices for emergency and trauma use, in Clearwater in 1989 and sold it to Ballard Medical Products three years later.

Davis raised $5 million from investors to get Code Blue off the ground and he remembers it as a scary experience. “But, you know, it was easier to raise money then than it is today. Investors understood the concept of risk a little better then. There is a high degree of risk aversion today and young entrepreneurs just starting out have a very difficult time.”

His next company, SilvaFoam/Trek Medical Corp. (1992-96), marketed a unique spray treatment for burns and ambulatory care products. Then, in 1993 he orchestrated his first startup in northern California, UroQuest Corp., which focused on medical devices for urology and plastic surgery. Chemfab Corp. bought UroQuest in 1999.

Startups continue to be his modus operandi. Of late, he has moved into ophthalmology devices and drug discovery, and also into stem cell therapies, proteomics and a blood-filtering process called apheresis. At present he is still at the helm of Pheresys Therapeutics Corp., which he founded in 2003, and EquinOx Pharmaceuticals Inc., which he established in 2006.

He says he doubts he will ever settle down to run one company. “I don’t know that that’s my skill set,” he notes. “I start companies and build them up to a certain point and move on. I consider myself more of a leader with entrepreneurial spirit. There are people who are much better managers than I am.”

Davis, if it is not clear by now, is a man of many talents. In his spare time he – often along with his wife – drives Porsches in sports car rallies, tours on a Honda Goldwing motorcycle and in an RV, studies ancient history and cosmology, skis on water and snow, plays golf and tennis, rides a recumbent bicycle over 100 miles per week, and travels to exotic places. His many honors include Distinguished Alumnus awards from both ODU and MCV.

A lot of topics excite him, but none more than the prospects for “biotech” breakthroughs, especially in proteomics, which is the study of the set of proteins an organism produces in its lifetime. As proteomics advances – it is more complicated than genomics – it promises a much better understanding of biological systems.

Davis sees it this way: “Information technology was the thing in the ’90s. But although investors by and large have been disappointed in biotech so far, that revolution is about to start. The problem is, Mother Nature has figured out extremely complex ways to do things. The science is going to have to catch up with the vision” of what proteomics, for example, can deliver. “We will be able to control and modify disease. I’m pretty excited about that. That’s where I have placed my bet.”