Third in a five-day series. I asked seven of the top biotech leaders in the city to name the three colleagues who they thought were the most influential players in the industry here. This week, I'll showcase the names that came up most often.

Please e-mail me your own selections at joetartakoff@seattlepi.com. I'll showcase those on Friday.

For a biotech entrepreneur, developing a drug that is later approved is often a singular achievement, the culmination of a successful career.

A. Bruce Montgomery

If "aztreonam lysine for inhalation," a drug for cystic fibosis, is approved by the FDA later this year, it will be the sixth approved drug that A. Bruce Montgomery, now the head of respiratory therapeutics at Gilead Sciences, will have played a key role in developing.

Clay Siegall, the CEO of Seattle Genetics, calls Montgomery "the top biotech entrepreneur in Seattle."

Montgomery says:

"I am not perfect, I have had many early failures that never got into man, mostly due to safety reasons, and two drugs that failed in phase 2, the early efficacy tests.

But my teams batting average is 6 for 8, or 0.750 ... when the industry average is less than 0.100 for those compounds that make it to human testing. The failures I own, the successes, my team."

At age 36, Montgomery managed to get the second AIDS drug, "aerosolized pentamidine," which he co-invented, approved by the FDA. Later, while working at Genentech, he helped develop Pulmozyme, a treatment for cystic fibrosis. There, he also thought of the concept that would eventually lead to the approval of Xolair, an injectable drug for allergic asthma, and also co-invented Raptiva, an injectable for psoriasis.

As executive vice president of research and development at Seattle's PathoGenesis he managed development of another cystic fibrosis drug, inhaled tobramycin, also known as TOBI. The company was later sold to Chiron for $700 million in 2000.

Montgomery then went on to start Corus Pharma, which was later sold to Gilead Sciences for $365 million two years ago. Since then, he has overseen Gilead's growing operations in Seattle, which now employ 130.

"As a physician, it is all about lives saved, Aerosolized Pentamidine is now an obsolete drug as antivirals have made it not needed. However it likely bought time for (tens) of thousands (of) HIV patients so that antivirals could be developed," Montgomery says.

"The improved survival of (cystic fibrosis) patients means worldwide at least a couple of thousand more people alive due to TOBI and Pulmozyme."

Montgomery has also served as chairman of the Washington Biotechnology and Biomedical Association (read an interview the group conducted with him here) and was appointed by the governor to serve on the board of trustees of the Life Sciences Discovery Fund.

Says H. Stewart Parker, the CEO of Targeted Genetics:

He is quiet but has a strong track record and is well respected in the local, state and national community. He has worked very effectively with Olympia and is now working hard as an advisory board member to the Life Sciences Discovery fund.