Profile in cureage: researcher builds a business to beat the AIDS epidemic.

• Author: Noland, Terrance
• Position: Burroughs Wellcome Co. - Company Profile

Researcher builds a business to beat the AIDS epidemic.

When he's not stalking a cure for AIDS, David Barry hunts quail. His companions are two English pointers that he and his wife, Gracia, pamper by keeping inside their Chapel Hill home. "That one there - Toby. I feel like him sometimes," Barry says, glancing up at a framed photo on his office wall that shows a white-and-brown dog standing frozen in a field - tail out, front leg curled, nose aimed dead ahead.

"The quail could be in the midst of briars and bush and everything else, and he just goes through it. He's so focused. He'll come out after a couple of hours of hunting, and he's got scrapes on his eyes, ears and chest, and his tail is bloody. When he wags it, blood splashes. And he won't even notice. He just looks at me like, 'Let's go.'" The day Barry took that picture, he left his camera in the car. It took him 15 minutes to walk back and get it. But when he returned, Toby hadn't moved.

Barry has the same dogged determination. He had it at Burroughs Wellcome while developing a billion-dollar-a-year herpes drug and helping to discover AZT, the first and still most-common AIDS treatment. He had it as he rose to the head of worldwide research for British parent Wellcome PLC, overseeing 3,200 researchers before being squeezed out last year in Glaxo PLC's takeover.

And he has it now in running his own drug company, Durham-based Triangle Pharmaceuticals, which he formed last year to develop and market anti-viral and anticancer treatments.

"Our financial projections are, by the year 2005, to have sales between $3 billion and $5 billion," he says matter-of-factly. Did he say billion? Pretty bold talk for a company that doesn't have a single drug on the market - and only one in clinical trials.

But Barry, who turns 53 in July, has reason to be confident. Triangle's specialty will be developing drugs to fight human immunodeficiency virus, which causes AIDS. No one knows more about that than him. "Hands down," says David Molowa, a biotech analyst with Bear, Stearns & Co. in New York City. "He's Mr. HIV."

He's got a great cast, too. His 14-employee staff - made up entirely of former Wellcome people - is stacked with top anti-viral scientists and executives, including Phil Furman and Sandra Lehrman, two of Barry's four AZT co-creators, and Nick Ellis, the former AZT global brand director. "It's a Who's Who," Molowa says. In the fallout from the takeover, Barry has reassembled the core of Wellcome's antiviral team, which dominated the field.

It's enough to leave analysts and investors salivating. Even before it had any products, Triangle had no trouble raising $3.5 million in outside capital in its first four months. "It was purely a management-team play," says Ellis, Triangle's president and chief operating officer. "The venture-capital firms did almost no due diligence at all. They said, 'How's your health?'"

"It's an absolutely extraordinary group," says Standish Fleming, general partner at San Diego-based Forward Ventures, which invested $750,000 and owns about 10% of Triangle. "[Glaxo CEO] Richard Sykes paid $15 billion for Wellcome to get access to the compounds and technologies these guys built. He got the compounds, we got the people. I think we got far and away the best end of that deal."

Still, Triangle's prospects depend largely. on whether Chairman and CEO Barry, a scientist at heart, has the business acumen to run a company. He contends he has proved he does. "You can't be the absentminded professor and be an R&D director of a major company."

At Wellcome, Barry had a reputation as an innovative and strong-willed leader. He wasn't afraid to butt heads with other executives and ran his group the way he saw fit. He got away with it because he had status. His group's anti-viral work helped turn the company into a drug powerhouse - something he's not shy about pointing out.

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