Finance History | One Amgen Center Drive — Eighteen Dollars a Share Before the Protein Paid

People treat Amgen as a Thousand Oaks campus and a line of injectable proteins.

The first public money arrived while the labs were still hunting for a product.

Applied Molecular Genetics Inc. was incorporated on 8 April 1980. Venture backers led by William K. Bowes put the firm in a shared building in Thousand Oaks that the company later called Building 1.

George B. Rathmann became chief executive that year. Early work tried shale oil bugs, faster chickens, and firefly light as readily as human proteins.

By mid-1983 the private cash was running out. Gordon Binder, then the chief financial officer, later said the firm would have been broke by September without a sale of shares.

On 17 June 1983 Amgen sold stock to the public. A 1991 Business Week account put the deal at 2.3 million shares at 18 dollars each, raising 41 million dollars in 1983 currency. The company's own later timeline says nearly 40 million dollars on about two million shares.

The stock did not see 18 dollars again for three years, according to that same 1991 account.

The mechanism is a development-stage biology shop using an equity market as a bridge between venture rounds and a cloned protein. EPOGEN did not reach the Food and Drug Administration until 1989.

The present campus at One Amgen Center Drive grew around those first rooms. The pin is the public edge of that drive, not a laboratory door.

Photo: Coolcaesar, 4 July 2016, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. A building on the Amgen headquarters campus, Thousand Oaks.