It’s hard to put a label on Charles Dunlop, founder and president of Ambry Genetics Corp. He is, in his own words, a “lab tech” who derives more joy from working in labs, yet he speaks with the boldness of a visionary when he says his main goal isn’t to cure a particular disease but all diseases. He’s a successful businessman and chief executive—he sold Ambry to Konica Minolta Inc. for nearly $1 billion in October—but he confessed that, “I have always been insecure that I wasn’t cool enough for [the chief executive role].”
Dunlop left for Hawaii after the deal closed. He said the family vacation was partially due to exhaustion and partially timing. The company needed to resettle, and he needed time to figure out what type of leader he should be, now that Ambry’s 750 employees are part of a much larger company. Konica has more than 400,000 employees.
What’s next for Dunlop? He doesn’t have an answer yet, but it’s most likely in research and development, because that’s his core.
Dunlop maintains some autonomy—Ambry was privately held and majority-owned by Dunlop and his family prior to the Konica sale—but asked not to have operational responsibilities. “I need to do what I need to do and be creative,” he said, adding that the merger now gives him “a very nice playground to play in.”
Taking Chances
Dunlop, who started Ambry with $500,000 from friends and family, is proud of the fact that it has never taken venture capital. “There are a hundred-something unicorns in America, and only a couple that never took any banker money, and I am one of them—I never read valuation,” he said.
Dunlop majored in physics at the University of California-San Diego and got his start in genetics at the Scripps Research Institute in Gregor Sutcliffe’s lab—Sutcliffe is the first person to sequence pBR322, an ampicillin resistance gene. He founded Ambry in 1999 with his brother, James, and began focusing on cystic fibrosis, an inherited disorder that affects the lungs. The cystic fibrosis testing business grew, and Ambry expanded into new markets. The company has detected over 13,000 deletions and duplications of over 30,000 samples using next-generation sequencing. In 2016 it created AmbryShare, a database that made information from 10,000 of its customers available to researchers.
Dunlop said Ambry was often the “first,” including being the first to offer multigene panels and diagnostic exome sequencing on a clinical basis. It was scary to be a forerunner, but he said, “I love those moments, I love the thrill.”
A semiprofessional big wave surfer in his younger days, Dunlop said doing business is like surfing. “In big-wave surfing, you don’t go in reckless. You go there, and you spend an hour to find that wave, that moment, and if you hesitate, you are finished, just like that.”
Scale
Dunlop said Konica is the right partner to take Ambry to the next level.
The Japanese printer maker has more synergy with Ambry than initially meets the eye. Its healthcare business includes diagnostic imaging, an area that it ramped up last year after buying Ambry and Invicro LLC in Boston.
Invicro provides imaging services to pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry, including software and analytics services. Terms were undisclosed, but Ambry Chief Executive Aaron Elliot said the deal is Konica’s second-largest buy after Ambry.
Elliott, who works closely with Dunlop, was named chief executive in 2016 when Dunlop announced his resignation after being diagnosed in 2014 with stage-four prostate cancer. Elliott previously served as chief operating officer and chief scientific officer.
Buying Invicro and Ambry enables Konica to accelerate development of its own medical platform, a proprietary pathology identifying High-Sensitivity Tissue Testing, or HSTT, and to bring together three informatics platforms to drive precision medicine.
Elliott said the combination unites genomics, imaging and HSTT capabilities, and “there are no companies out there that can offer [that kind of] diagnostics workflow.” He outlined 2018 priorities: completing integration with Konica and Invicro, strengthening U.S. presence and expanding internationally—starting with Japan. Ambry will add employees in medical affairs.
Charlie
Dunlop’s cancer is now three years in remission. The Konica sale made him wealthy, the Business Journal estimates $450 million, and he debuted at No. 33 on the Business Journal’s OC’s Wealthiest last year.
Elliott attributed the success of Ambry to the founder, noting that “Charlie built the company with no consultant, no financial analysis [with] management [comprised of] just homegrown people who moved up in the corporation as we grew.”
Dunlop, an aficionado of change, said Ambry will continue to be bold, first-to-market, and to launch products—“I love trying to make things better.”
