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Leadership from All Le vels 203

cal trials in Europe, and Nexell required significant funding if it
was to continue. Faced with letting its offspring fail, Baxter
acquired the rights to the products and spun them back in.
While Baxter was able to return the program to a solid foot-
ing, it found few supporters and even less funding. By 2004,
when Baxter was grappling with a corporate turnaround, few
people in either the business units or the corporate core were
interested in attempting to find a new path for these technolo-
gies, and the program was nearly canceled.
Commenting in 2008 on the Cellular Therapies program,
Riedel said, “[Cellular Therapies] has now existed for proba-
bly five years and I don’t even want to tell you how many
times someone tried to kill it. Many times. Even though a pro-
gram like that only cost us about $800,000 a year to run, peo-
ple were constantly after it. If I hadn’t been strong enough to
protect it, it would have died.”
Meanwhile, two of Hunt’s NTRI staffers, Paroo Uppal and
David Amrani, recognized within the technology a range of other
applications beyond oncology, and particularly a potential use in
cardiac therapies. The oncology business unit would have been
unlikely to recognize such opportunities and even less likely to
pursue them. Non-oncology applications, falling outside the
unit’s focus, would probably have failed to garner support.
The core device that Amrani and Uppal proposed could be
offered to health-care providers at a price below cost to seed
the market, as the sale of per-use cartridges and other products
would drive revenue and profits—the razor-and-razor-blade
model. Amrani and Uppal’s analysis suggested a total poten-
tial market of over $300 million per year and validated a seri-
ous unmet need. A significant patient population experiences
angina (extreme chest pain) that does not respond to existing
treatments. Most doctors believe this to be caused by low blood
flow to the heart. While it is not typically fatal, it can cause life-