Jim Mullen, who is arguably the tallest ceo anywhere in drugland, runs BiogenIdec, a biotech that is best known for its Tysabri multiple sclerosis biologic. The company has had its share of ups and downs - particularly when Tysabri was linked to deaths and was pulled off the market for awhile. Yet, Biogen continues to grow. In an interview with Xconomy, Mullen shares his thoughts on biotech and the challenges of growing a company. Here are a few of his comments…

On going from small to not-so-small: “The first bridge you walk over is the day that you don’t know the name of everybody in the company. Once that day happens, suddenly all the very informal interactions, they just have to become different. Then comes the time when the firm reaches around 700 employees. You’ve given up on knowing everybody’s name. And the sheer complexity of the business, the number of projects, the geographic distribution of operations, reach a point where you actually have to put in more professional processes or you don’t know what’s going on anymore.”

On competing with tiny biotechs: Small companies pose a serious threat, he says. When it comes to being nimble, “They will beat big biotech and big Pharma pretty much every day. It won’t look pretty, but…they’ll get to the essential point of knowledge creation faster.” His quandary, in his words: “How do you capture that? And can you capture that and still have it in-house?”

His answer is yes, and no. What he calls the “bigger experiment” in the company’s innovation strategy does not involve trying to replicate a startup-type environment, which “I think is impossible to create inside a big company.” Rather, it centers on building more relationships and stronger relationships with other companies and outside researchers, and then trying “to nurture those, monitor those, and capitalize on those when those things are appropriate.”

On patent reform: “Given the short product cycles in the software industry, it’s understandable that they’d want those changes. But the changes would have unintended and negative consequences for discovering and developing new cures and treatments for patients. If patent reform lowers the bar - by weakening the penalties - for competitors to infringe upon a valid patent, investors will not finance the lengthy and expensive development of biotech products.”

On biogenerics: “We have long supported the creation of a pathway for follow-on biologics,” he says, using a term for biogenerics preferred by many industry insiders. However, he believes that such a pathway must recognize “that biologics are vastly more complex” than the small molecule drugs typically made by big Pharma…”If we think we’re the knowledge economy and the innovation economy, that only works if there’s a way to protect the innovation.”

On integrating one acquistion: With Syntonix, Biogen left the entire firm pretty much alone, except for the finance and IT systems. But that was it. “You see anybody from corporate, lock the door,” is how he describes his instructions to the Syntonix team. “And that’s worked, so far, really well,” he says. “It’s early days, (but) we’ve lost nobody. In fact we found more value there than we thought we’d bought.”

On raising money: “There was a time in the ’90s when if you could spell ‘gene’ - and you could spell it any way you wanted - you could walk down Wall Street and get a hundred million dollars,” he quips. Around 1999, he says, the biotech bubble burst. “The consequence of that was the window for IPOs got very small, and that’s really persisted to this day.”

On the future: “I’ve been up and down the roller coaster four or five times on the stock price,” says Mullen. The best way to cope, he says, is “to keep your eye on what generates sustainable value.” Finding new ways to cultivate external innovation, while balancing those against in-house development and all the other details of running a company, are ever-more-important components of that strategy…

“..If you look for 30 years cumulatively, we’ve not made money as an industry. There are some spectacular successes, and there’s a huge amount of value that’s been created with the technology…We are catching up to where the Pharmas were maybe 20 years ago. The discoveries and developments over the next 20 years will be stunning.”