Nature Medicine | Spoonful of Medicine

Putting the small in small biotech

20110603.jpgDeveloping drugs all alone from the privacy of your own home would seem to present a challenge. Where is the pipette-wielding R&D team? The autoclave for the glassware? The cadre of lawyers and the marketing team? But, as Boston’s WBUR radio station reported earlier this week, one-person drug development companies are popping up all around the Boston area.

The radio piece highlighted some of the challenges of running the smallest of small biotechs from the corner of one’s living room or a tiny rented office space, and the reliance on contract research organizations to make the approach work. But we here at Nature Medicine wanted to know more about the science that fueled these companies to get started in the first place. So I contacted the CEOs (i.e., the sole employees) of two of these companies to learn more about their small-time origins.

Sheila DeWitt, a synthetic chemist and industry veteran of over 25 years, is the driving force behind Deuteria Pharmaceuticals, based in Andover, Massachusetts. In 2009, after her previous employer EPIX Pharmaceuticals went belly up, an old co-worker named Anthony Czarnik contacted her with a proposition. Czarnik had filed patents on hundreds of deuterium-enriched versions of common medicines and he had some promising preliminary data on a cholesterol-reducing statin. But he needed help moving the research beyond the bench. Even though Dewitt hadn’t seen him in ten years (until last weekend, that is), she licensed the compounds, rented a small office for $99 per month and founded her company to direct the development of his potential drugs.


DeWitt admits that even ten years ago she would have thought herself crazy to go it alone: “Why don’t you have a building to go to and what’s wrong with you?” she apes. “But I think it’s becoming a lot more common place. As long as you have the initiative and the expertise to do this, it’s not frowned upon.”

After more than two decades of working with assorted biotech and big pharma companies, Dennis Goldberg discovered his lead drug candidate by reading journal articles and contacting people in academia he thought had something great on their hands. His current project, through a company he runs out of his Sudbury, Massachusetts living room called LipimetiX, is an apolipoprotein E-based anti-cholesterol compound intended to treat atherosclerosis developed by researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

When looking for potential products to push to market, he looks for “mature science, so that I don’t have to do any more biology,” says Goldberg, a biochemist by training. “All we need to do now is get it manufactured commercially and we can move this in to the clinic.”

DeWitt and Goldberg each feel that they’re helping to save potential drugs that otherwise would have gotten tangled in the red tape of regulation or disappeared into the abyss of academia. They use contractors for the scientific work and production, and save a great deal of money in the process. “There are too many small biotech companies in this industry and not enough products,” Goldberg says. “I’m building products rather than companies.”

Image: flickr e-magine Art under Creative Commons

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