Avid: Crashing the protease inhibitor party

Avid Corp. CEO Forrest Anthony dates the genesis of Avid from a conversation he had in 1992 with Baruch Blumberg in the faculty lunch room at Balliol College, Oxford.

Anthony, then CEO of Quality Biotech, had written ahead to request a meeting with Blumberg, a pioneer in hepatitis research who was then a Master at Balliol. "I'd heard of his reputation and was going on a trip to England, so I wrote and he agreed to meet me. We had a marvelous lunch. I told him that I had an idea to start a spin-off from Quality and the goal was to develop antiviral drugs for hepatitis B...