As the Rhode Island Center for Cellular Medicine nears its third anniversary, the state-funded center of excellence has eight fledgling biotechnology companies under its wing with a ninth preparing to move here from Massachusetts. The first four companies selected for RICCM grants–BCR Diagnostics Inc., Cell Based Delivery Inc., MultiCell Associates Inc. and Spherics Inc.–continue to mature and have become mentors for the latest batch of biotech start-ups. The companies have received 14 patents and counting so far.
RICCM’s mission is to nurture a cluster of local biotechnology companies spinning products out of the tissue engineering research pioneered at Brown University and elsewhere. But the chief executive officer of one of the original companies funded by the center also sees RICCM as the state’s first line of defense against a costly brain drain out of Rhode Island.
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“There’s a lot of great technology in Rhode Island, but it goes elsewhere to find the resources,” warned MultiCell Associate’s Al Vasconcellos. “It goes to Boston. It goes to North Carolina. It leaves Rhode Island.”
Vasconcellos said MultiCell Associates, which is developing cells for artificial livers based on the research of Brown’s Dr. Hugo Jauregui, is a prime example. “Without the assistance of the state and RICCM to keep it here and to fund it,” he said, “we may have had to open it elsewhere to keep it running.”
A biotechnology industry isn’t built overnight, but RICCM President Michael Lysaght said he is happy with the center’s progress in its first three years. In that time, RICCM has awarded $1.2 million in grants and low-interest loans to eight biotech start-ups here and one that must relocate to Rhode Island from Massachusetts before it can pocket the grant money.
Meanwhile, the nine fledgling companies cumulatively have raised $6.5 million from federal agencies and private sources.
Cell Based Delivery of Providence, for one, landed a $2 million National Association of Standards and Technology grant last week, co-founder Dr. Robert Valentini said. In total the company has been awarded about $4 million in grants.
“NIST awards are highly competitive,” Lysaght said. “They’re off to a very good start.”
Incorporated in June 1997, Cell Based Delivery is developing implants that are engineered from human cells to administer growth hormones and other proteins to patients. Researchers at other companies are testing proteins to treat a host of diseases, but there isn’t a reliable way for patients to take them yet.
“It’s a big bottleneck,” Valentini said. “Proteins run the body in many ways, but they are very difficult to administer. You can’t really give them orally, and most of them don’t work really well if you just inject them.”
The biotech start-ups technology has several years of clinical trials ahead of it, but Valentini expects to begin ringing up sales some time around 2005.
Providence-based Spherics is working on another way to deliver drugs that can’t normally be taken orally. The company is developing tiny “microspheres” that can be swallowed. The microspheres, about the size of a grain of rice, stick to the wall of a patient’s stomach and release their medicine into the body without ever having come into contact with strong stomach acids, Lysaght said.
MultiCell Associates is targeting liver disease.
“Unlike kidney disease, where they throw you on dialysis, that doesn’t work for liver disease,” Vasconcellos said. “Once you’re in liver failure, if you can’t find an organ from a suitable donor, you die.”
In MultiCell’s Warwick laboratory, researchers are growing cells for external liver machines, which can keep patients alive for days or even weeks until a human organ is available for transplant.
The cells for external livers usually come from pigs, but that’s a less than ideal solution.
“The problem is that every time you do that you have to make sure the pig isn’t carrying some weird disease,” Vasconcellos said.
MultiCell’s long-term aim is to improve the cells used in external livers to the point that a patient could rely on the machine to cleanse his blood long enough for his own damaged liver to regenerate itself
BCR Diagnostics of Warwick is in the early stages of developing a fast detection test for bacteria.
“Normally, it takes a long time to detect bacteria,” Lysaght said. “You have to take a culture and send it out to the lab, and it can take 10 to 14 days to get the results.”
BCR Diagnostic’s test, based on the research of Brown professor M. Boris Rotman, would be instantaneous.
In the last two years RICCM also began working with EpiVax Inc., Summa Biologics LLC, Trau-motos Therapeutics LLP, CIRRUS Diagnostics Inc. and QIK Technology Inc.
Lysaght’s expects the center’s work to blossom into three or four companies with more than 100 high-paying biotech jobs and a network of smaller companies by its 10th anniversary in 2007.
The need for years of research and clinical trials before a biotech company can begin selling its products has held down biotech job growth so far, though. The nine companies that have been awarded RICCM grants today have the equivalent of 23 full-time employees.
The center has received $2.6 million from the state since it opened in 1997. That translates to a cost to taxpayers of about $110,870 per full-time job. For every dollar the center receives from the state, 70 cents goes to fund start-ups and 30 cents goes to promoting Rhode Island to the biotech industry and to pay for administrative expenses, Lysaght said.
“These companies are on sound footing financially,” he added. “We’re all over these guys. You have to be. You have to be there, without micromanaging or being overbearing, to make sure they’re going in the right direction and to give them a nudge when they aren’t.”
Cell Based Delivery’s Valentini appreciates the help.
“They’ve all been very helpful in giving us advice,” he said.
And, of course, the $125,000 low-interest RICCM loan didn’t hurt either.
“We’re using that to promote general development of the company,” Valentini said. “That’s valuable money for us because some of the federal money is earmarked for special programs, but we have a lot more flexibility with the state money.”
