Dr. Moses Goddard, co-inventor of CythoThera-peutics encapsulated cell technology, which failed in tests last spring, is attempting to buy the technology from the company, and use it to develop a cure for a rare disease that now causes blindness for about 5,000 people annually, mostly teenagers. Dr. Goddard said he and a company he would not identify, were in negotiations with Cy-toTherapeutics to buy the technology. Other sources, while not naming the firm, identified it as a foreign company. Goddard said they are “very close” to concluding negotiations and hoped they would be completed by the end of the first quarter of 2000, “hopefully earlier.”
This company, Goddard said, would have no ties to CytoThera-peutics and would be located in Rhode Island, at first a research facility with less than 20 employees and maybe in time a manufacturing firm, with upwards of 100.
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What Goddard hopes to buy is a technology that was being developed initially to treat such diseases as Parkinson’s, and was finally being developed to deal with chronic pain. With funding from AstraZeneca, the company had succeeded in its first phase trials of the chronic pain application, but failed in the second phase.
After that failure, AstraZen-eca’s decision to terminate its arrangement with CytoTherapeutics led to the company’s restructuring, ending the encapsulated cell research, which was done in Rhode Island and eliminating 60 jobs here.
The ophthalmic application for the encapsulated cell therapy had been pursued to a lesser degree by the company, and now Goddard hopes to make it his main priority. He said if all goes well, he would expect to be ready for human trials in three years, maybe sooner, with expectations that it will be a decade before anything is ready for market.
The sale of the encapsulated cell technology could prove important to CytoTherapeutics, which, according to its latest quarterly report, filed in mid-August, had enough “capital resources and income earned on investment capital” to “sufficiently” fund the company’s operations through the first quarter of 2000. The company was actively pursuing partners to continue its stem cell research, which it is now pursuing from its Sunnyvale, California facility.
Goddard was among those CytoTherapeutics employees who did not accompany the company west. Goddard said he will initially look to other CytoTherapeutics employees out of work here to staff the new company, plus additional people from the area. He said he also expects to use a number of consultants, also from the area.
Goddard has some roots in Rhode Island, graduating medical school from Brown University, and serving as an associate professor of surgical research at Brown.
The disease that Goddard hopes to first attack is Retinitis Pigmentosa, a rare eye disease that strikes about 5,000 new victims each year, with upwards of 100,000 affected by the disease in the United States, according to written reports.
Retinitis Pigmentosa attacks the retina and is a degenerative disease that initially produces night blindness and tunnel vision, and leads to total blindness. Dr. Goddard said the disease has been detected in youngsters as young as eight and most often affects teenagers. There currently is no cure.
Goddard expects that the research eventually will lead to treatment of other similar diseases, including Macular Degeneration, a disease that can result in the loss of central vision, but does not affect peripheral vision. It is among the leading causes of vision loss in the United States. Individuals with the disease can be helped with the use of vision aids. Victims tend to be 50 years of age and older.
CytoTherapeutics had once been the darling of Rhode Island’s bio-technology community, raising hopes and expectations that the state could become a center for such research and development CytoTherapeutics stock at one point soared to upwards of $18, but has settled now closer to $1.50 a share, with investors awaiting word of funding partners for its stem cell research.
Much hope had been placed in the encapsulated cell therapy only to have that dashed last spring. Goddard, however, wasn’t prepared to give up and indicated then that he would pursue efforts at funding the continuation of the research, particularly in the ophthalmic area.
But the experiences of CytoTherapeutics and other bio-technology companies, have made investors wary, preferring a slower approach to development. This, Goddard said, is the approach his potential investor appears to be ready to take.
“Everybody’s had their fingers a little bit burned in this area,” he said. “The investors in the acquiring company want to proceed a little bit.” Eventually, however, he hopes to proceed even further, to “recreating a manufacturing entity here in Rhode Island.”
