By TOM MARINER //
Farmingdale’s Enzo Biochem has been a prescient predictor of biotechnology advances for nearly five decades – forever innovating, protecting and delivering the “right” bio products at the right time.
The New York Stock Exchange-listed firm was co-founded in 1976 in New York City by Elazar Rabbani, a Persian who’d fled Iran to focus on biotech research and development in the West. Twelve years later, the burgeoning industry led the firm to Long Island, where it began growing disparate divisions concentrating on diverse elements of the fast-expanding field.
Over the ensuing decades, Enzo Biochem has developed a 200,000-product-strong portfolio of proprietary technologies, with many breakthroughs – nonradioactive labeling for DNA and RNA probes, for instance – revolutionizing genetic testing and other molecular-biology pursuits.
Tom Marino: Beginning of the Enzo.
The tools and techniques the company has fostered famously enhance the accuracy and efficiency of laboratory testing and are the backbone of many current R&D efforts. Look no further than the 1 million-plus COVID-19 tests performed by Enzo Clinical Labs, a molecular-diagnostic spinoff Rabbani launched in 1983 (and sold off to Laboratory Corporation of America Holdings in 2023).
This respected station as a key biotech innovator is illustrated by high-profile legal battles over alleged patent infringements, generally won by Enzo Biochem. The company has amassed more than 500 patents, and competitors try often to replicate their astounding results.
In 2010, Rabbani recruited Kara Cannon, then vice president of diagnostics and biotechnology at Port Washington’s Pall Corporation, for a senior management role. The CEO knew that her 20 years of hands-on biotechnology knowledge, including her experience developing highly successful diagnostic tools, would make a huge difference for Enzo Biochem.
Of course, he was right: Cannon’s biology degree from Pennsylvania’s Franklin & Marshall College and her intimate familiarity with biotechnology quality and regulatory standards have shepherded many of Enzo Biochem’s stellar advances, serving both basic researchers and Big Biopharma through the discovery, development and manufacturing phases.
Her expertise not only propelled her up Enzo Biochem’s ranks – from head of global commercial operations (life sciences) to chief commercial officer to chief operating officer, and finally to CEO last September – but has given her the wisdom to overcome the occasional stumbling block.
Last month, for instance, Enzo Biochem agreed to pay $4.5 million in penalties over health-data security failures following a 2023 ransomware attack that affected 2.4 million patients. Investigations by state attorneys general from New York, Connecticut and New Jersey revealed that Enzo employees were sharing network-login credentials, including one that hadn’t been changed in years – a window cyber-attackers used to install malicious software on multiple systems.
It’s a mistake the company won’t make again. Already, Enzo Biochem is implementing new policies to encrypt and otherwise limit access to personal information, adding multifactor authentication procedures to all user accounts and otherwise beefing up its information security.
Kara Cannon: Personal touch.
And the misstep has not weakened Enzo Biotech’s position at the epicenter of Long Island’s exploding biotech industry. The Farmingdale-based firm maintains its critical International Organization for Standardization 13485 qualifications – immutable requirements governing medical-device safety – while Cannon fills a seat on the Farmingdale State College Board of Trustees, helping the college define graduate-level biotech quality and regulatory courses.
While her company’s products are designed to help the masses, Cannon is a big fan of personalized medicine, an emerging practice that leverages individual genetic profiles to guide healthcare decisions. As she sees it, her role at Enzo Biochem is to meld these two worlds – guiding the people the company serves by keeping it on the leading edge of the complex biotechnology industry.
Not exactly the career path the young biologist once imagined, but she’s not complaining.
“After earning my bachelor’s, I intended to work for a year, then continue to advanced degrees,” Cannon said. “But once I was in the bio industry, it was too exciting to leave.”
Tom Mariner is the executive director of Bayport-based Long Island Bio.
