Bioworks lands former Accredo executive to screen potential biotech business

Memphis Business Journal
September 22, 2006
By Scott Shepard

Memphis Bioworks Foundation has lured Accredo Health veteran Harry Travis as a non-paid Executive in Residence to help identify viable biotech proposals.

Travis previously was chief operating officer of Accredo's flagship Nova Factor division. When Accredo shareholders voted to sell the company to New Jersey-based Medco Health Solutions, Inc., in August 2005, Travis opted to cash out and seek new opportunities.

"I was in the top management at Accredo, but with Medco I would have been in a group of 250 top people," Travis says. "I have more fun and feel more comfortable in an entrepreneurial, small company environment."

His new job is to sift through business proposals that come into Bioworks each week and evaluate them for their business potential. The word is out, Travis says, that Memphis is a prime place for biotech entrepreneurs, so proposals come in from all over the U.S. Some are good, many are not, and some are good but not for Memphis.

"This place is reaching critical mass so people are submitting ideas," he says. "Steve Bares doesn't have the time to go through them all."

Bares, president of Bioworks, is already pulled in dozens of directions, ranging from development of the UT-Baptist Research Park to testifying in Nashville and Washington, D.C., on research funding. One of Travis' first assignments was a logistics study done last year. Bares asked Travis to go through it and come up with an action plan.

"There are a fair number of ideas around, in reagents, proteins, compounds and processes -- things that can be sold to other labs if they just have a business element," Travis says. "I knew there was enough early-stage here if I could just get plugged into it."

Ultimately, Travis hopes to identify a start-up business that can benefit from his background in biologistics. His desire is to help start a new Memphis company that he discovers while at Bioworks.

"For me it's a win either way," Bares says. "At the end of the day I like having Harry around, and as Memphis goes through a transition like this I like having talented people in the community creating new jobs."

Travis is a pharmacist by training who after two years of retail work earned an MBA to pursue a business career track. He spent five years in Nashville with Cardinal Health, a company that distributes pharmaceuticals to physician offices, and nine years as director of marketing for IV therapy products at Baxter Healthcare. With two partners, Travis also started and then sold an infusion pump company.

"There isn't a day that goes by that I'm not drawing on my pharmacy experience," he says.

It was last year while going through the Leadership Memphis program that Travis developed a renewed sense of community. He was inspired to get involved after Bares spoke to the group.

It's the same vision of building on Memphis' strengths, he says, in orthopedics, musculoskeletal innovation and logistics. Many companies that first come to Memphis for logistics support will eventually contract other services locally.

Memphis Bioworks Foundation

Developer of UT-Baptist Research Park

President: Steve Bares

Address: 20 S. Dudley

Phone: 448-8800

Web site: www.memphisbioworks.org

sshepard@bizjournals.com | 259-1724