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Nobels Don’t Assure Success For Biotechs

Nobels Don’t Assure Success For Biotechs

BY MARION WEBB

Senior Staff Writer

Three San Diego biotechnology companies can now boast Nobel Prize-winning backing.

But officials at Idun Pharmaceuticals Inc., Triad Therapeutics and Syrrx Inc. would be first to admit that getting advice from the world’s greatest scientific authorities doesn’t guarantee their research will translate into new medicines.

Nor is it likely to draw investors’ attention. Biotech is a very high-risk business; it takes hundreds of millions of dollars and almost a decade to develop a single drug. Most fail to make it through regulatory approval.

But Idun chief executive Steven J. Mento said having an exclusive license on the discoveries by Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientist H. Robert Horvitz, who won the Nobel Prize in medicine last week, is clearly helpful.

“Clearly having the recognition that one of the founders won the Nobel Prize will draw attention to the company indirectly,” Mento said.

Horvitz and John Reed, president of the Burnham Institute in San Diego, co-founded Idun in 1994 based on Horvitz’s discovery of a cell death gene. Persuading investors the technology works has been difficult.

Mento hopes to raise at least $25 million in a private financing.

The money is needed to advance Idun’s lead drug, which is designed to prevent cell death for liver disease.

Idun tested an intravenous formulation of the drug for alcohol-related hepatitis C and planned to move into a Phase II testing.

After re-evaluating the market potential, Idun decided instead to develop an oral drug for hepatitis C patients who failed conventional therapy , a much bigger market, Mento said.

But that means Idun will have to persuade investors to back the delay in development for what would be a better drug and a larger market, said John McCamant, editor of the Medical Technology Stock Letter in Berkeley.

Syrrx and Triad, by contrast, are still doing research. Both started out with rival technologies to study proteins for other companies. They now want to use this knowledge to develop their own drugs, a move favored by the investment community.

Their scientific adviser, Kurt Wuethrich, a scientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and visiting professor at the Scripps Research Institute won the Nobel Prize this year for chemistry.

Stephen Coutts, Triad’s president, said Wuethrich visits the company four times a year to get a scientific update.

Wuethrich developed nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometry to learn structural information about proteins, which is at the core of Triad’s work, Coutts said.

Whether that gives the firm a financial boost remains to be seen. Coutts hopes to raise $25 million in a third round of financing, which would give it enough money to last through 2003.

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