Science in the Triangle

Tranzyme Pharma signs on to help Bristol-Myers Squibb fight generic competition, RTI International receives a $101 million contract to fight malaria in Africa and a drug safety expert at the Hamner Institutes for Health Sciences teams up with a geneticist at N.C. State University to find out why some patients have serious liver reactions to otherwise safe drugs.

Tranzyme signs partnership with Bristol-Myers Squibb

It’s a deal that both companies needed and that will add 10 to 12 jobs in the Research Triangle Park area.

Tranzyme Pharma, a Durham drug develop company that employs 25, had been looking to raise at least $30 million to get its first drug to market. (More on that here.) The deal with Bristol-Myers Squibb will net Tranzyme $16 million in the next two years. But if the partners are successful in finding new medicines, developing them and bringing them to market, the deal could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

To expand discovery and early development work under the partnership, Tranzyme plans to add 10 to 12 employees.

Like other large drugmakes, New York-based BMS is facing serious generic competition. In the next five years, the company stands to lose about 37 percent of its sales as two of its biggest sellers go off patent and compete with cheaper generic copy cats. The deal with Tranzyme offers BMS hope to find replacements for its product lineup.

In other business news:

• Credit Suisse will start hiring 300 at its RTP operations, where the Swiss banking giants already employs about 1,000.
• Quintiles Transnational raises $525 million on the bond market to pay its large stakeholders a fat dividend.
• Swiss ag biotech company Syngenta, which develops all of its new biotech crop seeds in RTP, added 100,000 square feet to the about 200,000 square feet it already had in RTP and agreed to buy 50 acres for future expansions.

RTI receives $101 million contract to reduce malaria

RTI International, a research institute in RTP, received a $101 million contract from the U.S. Agency for International Development to fight malaria in Africa.

Under the contract, RTI workers will spray the inside walls of homes to kill anopheles mosquitos, which carry the parasite that causes malaria and transmit it to humans.

Foom 2006 to 2008, about 6 million homes in 11 African countries were sprayed. Under the new contract, the effort will be extended to a dozen.

The five-year program aims to cut the malaria-related childhood mortality in 15 African countries in half. Malaria kills more than 1.2 million people every year and causes worldwide economic losses of $12 billion.

In other research news:

• RTI researchers calculated the cost of mandatory CO2 emission reductions. (More about that here.)
• The 15 percent of adult Americans with a disability account for 27 percent of U.S. adult health-care spending. (More about that here.)
• Dr. Ronald Kahn of the Joslin Diabetes Center visits RTP to talk about digging for the roots of diabetes, and UNC researchers stumble over a genetic marker for diabetes in African-Americans. (More about that here.)

Researchers team up to probe drug side effects

David Threadgill

Dr. Paul Watkins

Dr. Paul Watkins, a liver toxicity expert at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a founding member of the Hamner-UNC Institute for Drug Safety Sciences in RTP, is teaming up with David Threadgill, head of the genetics department at N.C. State University, to study why some patients have serious liver reactions to otherwise safe drugs.

The two researchers were awarded a $1 million grant from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases to conduct their work.

For the two-year project, Watkins and Threadgill will use a specially bred mouse that represents the genetic diversity in the human population. The researchers expect to uncover genetic risk factors that could lead to tests to identify patients at risk and improve the safety of future medicines.