Milestones Icon: Marvin Caruthers

Boulder’s biotech industry wouldn’t be where it is today without the help of Marvin Caruthers.

Caruthers, a University of Colorado chemistry and biochemistry professor, has formed numerous biotechnology companies, including Genomica Corp., which was bought in 2001 by San Francisco-based Exelixis Inc., Thousand Oaks, Calif.-based Amgen Inc., and Foster City, Calif.-based Applied Biosystems Inc.

He’s also known for helping form NeXstar Pharmaceuticals Inc., which now is a part of Foster City, Calif.-based Gilead Sciences Inc.; Ribozyme Pharmaceuticals Inc., now San Francisco-based Sirna Therapeutics Inc. and still has an office in Boulder; as well as Boulder-based Array Biopharma Inc.

Caruthers, who was awarded a 2003 Esprit Entrepreneur Lifetime Achievement award, is still a major shareholder in Array and serves on its board of directors. He also keeps his hand in many of the other companies he helped start.

Many of those companies were in collaboration with Kyle Lefkoff. When Lefkoff started Boulder Ventures Ltd. in 1995, Caruthers became a founding investor and a founding member of the company’s investment committee. He’s still a venture partner with the firm.

Besides all his biotech endeavors, he and his wife, Jennie, created the Caruthers Family Foundation, which focuses on helping impoverished children get medical and dental care.

He also donated $20 million to the University of Colorado to help construct an interdisciplinary biotechnology building. The donation was the largest by a faculty member and one of the largest in the school’s history.

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