Science in the Triangle

A $500 ticket to the Biotech conference Monday and Tuesday offered face time with heavy-hitting investors. After an 18-month, deep recession that dried up funding for drug research and development nationwide, it was a lure that attracted Research Triangle area companies to the Raleigh Convention Center in droves.

The visitors made it clear they and other investors remain skittish, but they also noted signs of hope, such as the handful of initial public offerings by biotech companies in past months and an adjustment in venture funding last year in favor of early-stage companies.

Stephen Sands

“When we look at a year ago, we’re really all taking a breath of relief that the Dow [Jones stock index] is over 10,000,” said Stephen Sands, vice chairman of U.S. investment banking in Lazard’s healthcare group, who moderated a panel addressing the future of biotech funding at the conference.

But Sands and panel members, which included Cecilia Gonzalo, managing director at Warburg Pincus, a firm that has invested more than $35 billion in the past 40 years; Ed Mathers, a partner at the venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates; and Lauren Silverman, managing director of an investment fund Swiss drugmaker Novartis established in 2007; provided few clues about new ways of financing innovation and job creation to help the U.S. compete with lower-cost countries such as China and India.

Mathers suggested companies take more advantage of government grants, which are becoming more plentiful, especially for the development of “green” technology. But don’t become a government contractor, Silverman warned.

So what’s an entrepreneurial researchers to do whose innovation doesn’t catch the eye of a traditional investor?

Dr. Allen Roses

Dr. Allen Roses, a Duke University professor and former executive at GlaxoSmithKline’s U.S. Headquarters in RTP who spent years researching genetic risks of developing Alzheimer’s disease, offered one solution at the conference: “You can go it alone,” he said.

That’s what Roses did to develop a novel approach that promises to delay the onset of Alzheimer’s. The approach combines a test to detect a genetic marker linked to an increased risk for Alzheimer’s and a medicine that addresses the gene-based risk factor. Such a combination of test and therapy is generally known as personalized medicine, a new area of drug development.

Roses said he used his house to borrow money from the bank and established three companies to generate revenue and pursue regulatory approval of the test-and-therapy combo over the next five years. One company offers consulting services to large drugmakers also looking into personalized medicine. A second company develops diagnostics, including the test for the Alzheimer’s marker. The third company is focused on getting the rights to a diabetes drug that, Roses believes, addresses the gene-based risk factor that about one-fourth of the U.S. population carry for developing Alzheimer’s.

The test, which will be used in a clinical study the Food and Drug Administration approved of in October, looks for a protein that transports cholesterol in the bloodstream. A gene provides the instructions to make the protein, known as apolipoprotein E4, or APOE4. Research involving the APOE gene has shown that Type 2 diabetes may be linked to dementia, but it is unclear how.

GSK studied rosiglitazone, also known as its diabetes drug Avandia, as an Alzheimer’s therapy, but the clinical trial results were disappointing.

Roses declined to provide details about the diabetes drug he’s interested in for his test-and-therapy combo.

“It’s a new way of looking at a complex disease,” he said.