Hubert Schoemaker

Hubert Jacob Paul Schoemaker (March 23, 1950 – January 1, 2006) was a Dutch biotechnologist. He was a co-founder and the president of one of America's first biotechnology companies, Centocor, which was founded in 1979 for the commercialising of monoclonal antibodies. In 1999 he founded Neuronyx, Inc., for the manufacture of stem cells and the development of stem-cell therapies.

Early life and education Schoemaker was born in Deventer, Netherlands. He attended St. Bernardus School in Deventer, and Canisius College, Nijmegen. In 1969 he moved to the United States to attend the University of Notre Dame, where he majored in chemistry, graduating in May 1972. Soon after he married Ann Postorino.

He then earned a doctorate in biochemistry in 1975 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Supervised by Paul Schimmel, his doctoral research was an investigation of the structure function relationships of transfer RNAs and their complexes. In 1980 Schoemaker joined Centocor and soon after became its first chief executive officer.

Despite the company's success on the diagnostic front, Schoemaker was plunged in 1992 into efforts to save the company from bankruptcy when its first therapeutic, Centoxin, a drug designed to treat septic shock, failed to win FDA approval. In part the crisis had come about as a result of the company's executives trying to go it alone in developing the drug. What saved the company was a return to the policy of collaboration. Learning from its mistakes with Centoxin, in December 1994 Centocor gained marketing approval for ReoPro, a monoclonal antibody drug for cardiovascular disease. The first therapeutic to ever receive simultaneous US and European approvals, and the second monoclonal antibody to ever win approval as a drug, ReoPro marked a milestone for both Centocor and for monoclonal antibodies therapeutics. ReoPro was to be followed in August 1998 by the approval of Centocor's Remicade, a drug to treat auto-immune disorders like Crohn's disease and rheumatoid arthritis.

After selling Centocor to Johnson and Johnson in 1999, Schoemaker went on to form Neuronyx, Inc., a biotech company focused on developing cellular therapies. After Schoemaker died in 2006 the company was continued by his wife Anne Faulkner Schoemaker. Initial work focused on using stem cells taken from adult bone marrow to help regenerate heart tissue damaged during heart attacks. Later the company turned direction to looking at the development of a treatment for incision wounds in women following breast cancer reconstruction surgery. The company later changed its name to Garnet BioTherapeutics. Despite promising clinical results and raising more than $55 million in venture capital funding, the company was unable to continue.

Death Schoemaker was diagnosed in 1994 with a form of brain cancer, medulloblastoma. He died on January 1, 2006, at age 55.