Ivor Royston was born in Retford, England, in 1945. He lived in Nottinghamshire near Sherwood Forest, and his mother used to take him there for walks. Royston’s family emigrated to the United States in 1954, and Royston became a naturalized American citizen.

Best known as the co-founder of San Diego’s biotech industry, Royston is impatient with obstacles to better treatment of cancer. In his careers as medical researcher and clinician, entrepreneur and venture capitalist, Royston has worked to break down those barriers.

Researcher And Clinician

Trained as a medical doctor at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Royston studied as a cancer researcher at the National Institutes of Health and completed a fellowship in oncology at Stanford University. He was appointed by President Clinton to the National Cancer Advisory Board in 1996. He was a faculty member at the UCSD School of Medicine and headed the oncology program at the San Diego VA Medical Center.

In 1990, Royston co-founded the San Diego Regional Cancer Center, now the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center, because he thought basic cancer research took too long to reach patients in the form of new treatments.

Royston’s specialty is immunology. He has long believed that cancer patients can overcome the disease if their immune systems are trained to recognize cancer cells as foreign. Many of the companies he has founded or invested in, such as Idec Pharmaceuticals, Favrille and CancerVax, were established on that premise.

Entrepreneur

Royston co-founded San Diego’s first biotech company, Hybritech, with Howard Birndorf in 1977. Royston and Birndorf saw that monoclonal antibodies, just recently invented, would be well-suited to use as tests and therapies. Big pharmaceutical companies turned a cold shoulder to Royston’s entreaties, so he decided to do it himself.

Hybritech was a roaring success. Eli Lilly bought the company for about $400 million in 1986. Royston and Hybritech veterans went on to found other companies, including Idec Pharmaceuticals, which uses monoclonal antibodies as treatments for cancer.

Venture Capitalist

In the early 1990s, Royston co-founded a life science-focused venture capital firm, Forward Ventures. It began as a hobby fund, but associates convinced him to turn the firm into a professionally managed venture capital fund. Today, Forward Ventures has about $350 million under management, invested in biomedical companies across the country. Last year, Royston resigned as head of the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center to work full time at Foward Ventures.

Royston had a tentative fourth career of sorts in Hollywood. He wrote a screenplay, titled “The Cure,” about a researcher who discovers a cure for cancer. The catch is that people must be killed to make it.

Royston also made a movie called “Soultaker,” about two teen-agers who “die” but try to escape the Grim Reaper. The reviews were not good. One review on the Epinions Web site calls it a “below sewer-level film made in the ’80s, which touches on death in a really bad way.”

Luckily for the biotech community and cancer patients, Royston kept his day job.

— Bradley J. Fikes