Genentech

Genentech, Inc. is an American biotechnology corporation headquartered in South San Francisco, California. It operates as an independent subsidiary of holding company Roche. Genentech Research and Early Development operates as an independent center within Roche. Historically, the company is regarded as the world's first biotechnology company. As of 2026, Genentech employs around 12,100 people. The company was founded in 1976 by venture capitalist Robert A. Swanson and biochemist Herbert Boyer. Boyer is considered to be a pioneer in the field of recombinant DNA technology. In 1973, Boyer and his colleague Stanley Norman Cohen demonstrated that restriction enzymes could be used as "scissors" to cut DNA fragments of interest from one source, to be ligated into a similarly cut plasmid vector. While Cohen returned to the laboratory in academia, Swanson contacted Boyer to found the company. Boyer worked with Arthur Riggs and Keiichi Itakura from the Beckman Research Institute, and the group became the first to successfully express a human gene in bacteria when they produced the hormone somatostatin in 1977.