Your grandmother with Alzheimer’s disease, your friend with depression and the people we all know with cancer. Biotechnology is knocking on the door of all these diseases and Rhode Island is an emerging hub for translating cutting-edge advances in scientific understanding into new medicines to fight these diseases.
The foundation of the biotechnology industry lies in questions that have engaged thinkers and doers for millennia: How does the brain work? Why do we age? What happens when cancer cells get out of control and take over the body? Why are some people especially vulnerable to developing alcohol use disorder?
Developing therapies for these disorders starts with figuring out how the body works, what happens when things go wrong and designing interventions that will put things right. These efforts require an enormous range of expertise and skills.
Scientists working at the laboratory bench make new discoveries, test how they relate to disease processes and develop prototype therapies. Biomedical engineers scale up these protypes so they can be produced in the quantity and purity required for delivering them to patients.
Manufacturing these complex therapeutics requires many skills, including chemical engineering, assay development, process development and regulatory compliance. There is a vast economic opportunity in biotech.
A successful biotechnology ecosystem requires partnership, cooperation and financial backing. Almost all the new drugs and therapies being developed today have their roots in basic science – “how things work” – that is carried out at universities, hospitals and research institutes. In ways that usually cannot be predicted, this basic science can yield insights that point to potential therapeutics for diseases that are currently untreatable.
In my own career I have had the privilege to be involved in two such “bench to bedside” efforts. Our current focus is on Alzheimer’s disease and major depression. Along with my former Brown University colleague Ashley Webb, we discovered a pathway that can wake up stem cells in the brain and prompt them to make new nerve cells [neurons]. Making new neurons could replace the ones lost in neurodegeneration, and also improve the function of the brain circuits that are compromised in major depression.
Boosting the production of new neurons could also be useful for treating stroke, brain injury and other neurodegenerative diseases. We then came up with an idea for a drug that could target this pathway.
This idea became the basis for Bolden Therapeutics Inc., which I co-founded with Ashley Webb and Johnny Page, a master’s student in my lab at the time who is now Bolden’s CEO. We worked with Brown Technology Innovations to license the patents that were foundational for the company spinout.
To date, Bolden has raised close to $3 million in private and government support and currently employs six scientists, along with a network of consultants to further our mission. The team has already discovered novel drugs targeting our pathway and we are now testing them in animal models.
Biotechnology is an industry. In addition to scientists, there are a wide range of job opportunities in management, intellectual property and business law, technical and administrative support, and ultimately manufacturing and marketing.
Together, this team works to bring lifesaving medicines to people suffering from devastating diseases. I am excited by the prospect of Rhode Island playing a major part in this work.
Justin R. Fallon is a professor of neuroscience and human psychiatry at Brown University and co-founder of Providence-based Bolden Therapeutics Inc.
