While Howard was President and Scientific Director at Affymax Research Institute, Willem 'Pim' Stemmer[22] conceived and developed DNA shuffling Technology.
[7] This revolutionary technology for improving the expressed phenotype of genes, pathways, plasmids, viruses and genomes gave birth to the creation and spinout of Maxygen Inc.[23] where Howard was CEO for 12 years (1997-2009).
Maxygen exploited DNA Shuffling technology across the entire Life Sciences spectrum, creating new companies dedicated to Agricultural Products (Verdia[25]) and Industrial Chemical opportunities (Codexis[26]) as well as a Protein Pharmaceuticals Business (Perseid[27]).
[31] In 1994, he was named President and Scientific Director of Affymax, Inc. where he managed teams working on small molecule drug lead discovery using combinatorial chemistry and high throughput target screening.
[23] From 1997 to 2009, Howard worked as Maxygen's CEO, focusing on human, including, protein pharmaceutical drugs and vaccine discovery, as core business.
In 2008, he left Maxygen with $200MM in cash, no debt, on-going clinical stage drug development programs and multiple partnerships and licenses with other parties.
Following his departure, Howard started Oakbio, Inc., doing business as NovoNutrients Inc, a privately held Clean Technology company in Sunnyvale, California, USA.
Howard's >145 publications tackle topics ranging from the metabolism of the algae Caulerpa simpliciuscula, to the molecular pathogenesis of human cerebral malaria and the role of parasite antigenic variation and infected cell adherence in disease virulence.
At the NIH he patented discovery, characterisation and cloning of a novel gene encoding a soluble malarial antigen, called PfHRP2[32] that the most lethal human malaria releases into the blood.
This discovery led to a rapid, sensitive, inexpensive and reliable diagnostic test for malaria infection that the NIH licensed commercially.