A little colour from the Boston Globe (Momenta sounds interesting...) -
When the Swiss biotech firm Novartis Pharma AG announced that they'd be moving into the old Necco candy factory in Cambridge, there was a sticky problem: how to get 75 years worth of sugar residue off the walls. Chemists and biologists, after all, need a spiffy and sterile work environment -- one that doesn't exude the powdery-sweet aroma of Necco wafers.
But once the last molecule of sugar has been scrubbed from the walls and scientists begin moving in later this year to what will be known as the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research, don't be surprised if a handful of the 700 researchers wind up working with . . . sugar molecules.
Glycomics, the study of sugars and how they function in living organisms, is a pocket of intense activity within the biotech field.
Last year, MIT's Technology Review magazine characterized glycomics as one of "10 emerging technologies that will change the world." Several privately held New England glycomics companies attracted funding in 2003, and one publicly held Boston company has a sugar-based cancer drug that's expected to start clinical trials -- for a second time -- later this year.
Not much is known about the role that sugars play in disease, and researchers believe that better understanding that role could make existing drugs safer and more powerful, and lead to the development of entirely new treatments.
But the sugars in your body are more complex, structurally, than DNA. While DNA has just four building blocks (the nucleotides adenine, guanine, thymine, and cytosine), some sugars have as many as 48 building blocks. So understanding the sequence of those building blocks and the function of sugars -- what's broadly termed glycomics -- has lagged behind genomics (understanding DNA) and proteomics (understanding proteins).
Some biotech execs think that figuring out how to sequence sugars could lead to a profusion of companies developing drugs based on the newfound knowledge.
"We draw analogies to the 1970s, when it first became possible to sequence DNA," says Alan Crane, chief executive of Momenta Pharmaceuticals in Cambridge. "It was the sequencing of DNA that laid the groundwork for the first wave of biotechnology companies, like Genetics Institute, Biogen, Amgen, Genentech. They all got started because they knew how to sequence DNA.
"But it's as if we were in the pre-DNA sequencing era with sugars," Crane continues. "The ability to sequence sugars, understand their biological activity, and use that knowledge to make drugs would open up a lot of doors."
The sugar molecules that coat the outside of your cells, and that float around between cells, seem to be important supporting players in various types of cancers, autoimmune disorders, and diseases of the central nervous systems, but the science is still very young.
One of Momenta's key assets is a sugar-sequencing technology developed at MIT and licensed exclusively to Momenta for commercial use. Crane says that the company's facility near Fresh Pond in Cambridge is one of two labs in the world that can sequence complex sugars. (The other is at MIT.) Last year, Momenta raised a $19 million second round of funding, in part from local firms Polaris Venture Partners and Atlas Venture, bringing its total raised to $25 million.
But the company doesn't plan to sell its super-secret sugar sequencing technology to others -- at least in the short term. Instead, Momenta will use the technology to develop generic versions of complex drugs, which will give the company an early infusion of revenue; improve existing blockbuster drugs; explore ways to use sugars to deliver large-molecule, protein-based drugs via inhalation; and develop drugs of its own.
Momenta's first big product development partnership is with Sandoz Inc., a division of Novartis that makes generic drugs. (As an aside, Sandoz is the company that, in 1938, first synthesized LSD.)
In New Hampshire, a start-up called GlycoFi is collaborating with Biogen and Baxter Healthcare on an approach to using yeast cells to produce therapeutic proteins, instead of the mammalian cells currently used in biotech manufacturing.
GlycoFi's scientific breakthrough was getting the yeast cells to produce proteins that were "decorated" with the correct lacing of sugar molecules; the company says that the resulting proteins are purer than those produced by mammalian cells. The company raised a third round of $10 million in December, in part from Polaris and Boston Millennia Partners.
Biotech companies have tried in the past to develop sugar-based drugs (not to be confused with sugar pills, or placebos). One notable failure was Alpha-Beta Technology, a publicly held Worcester company that brought a drug intended to prevent surgical infections all the way to phase III trials. But the trials failed to show any benefit, and the company went out of business.
The oddest player in the local glycomics field is GlycoGenesys, a Back Bay company traded on Nasdaq's SmallCap exchange. The company started out in 1992 as IGG International, developing biotechnology products for the agricultural industry (none is currently on the market).
In 1995, the company went public through a reverse-merger with a shell company. Then the name changed to SafeScience and the company entered the business of making environmentally safe household cleaners, including a really swell noncaustic bathroom cleaner (these were sold briefly, but none is currently on the market).
In 2001 it was time to adopt the current name and a focus on deploying sugars derived from fruit pectin, the goopy white stuff that encases oranges, to fight cancer.
John Burns, the company's chief financial officer, says its drug candidate, known as GCS-100, is "selective to cancer cells -- it doesn't kill healthy cells." But clinical trials that seemed to be moving forward last year have now essentially been restarted with a new formulation of GCS-100 that contains less ethanol. (Ethanol, or grain alcohol, was a byproduct of the drug's manufacturing process, and its presence was a key factor in limiting the dose of GCS-100 that patients could take.)
The company's scientific founder left in 2000, and the board chairman, Brian Hughes, departed last February. At the time of his resignation, Hughes wrote a scathing letter: "The company has been unable to attract or retain the full team of scientific, medical and regulatory professionals required to bring the company's drug to market. For some time I have been unable to convince [chief executive Bradley Carver] or the board to make the changes I believe are necessary to solve this fundamental problem, which is a root cause of the other challenges facing the company."
"I think the field of glycomics has tremendous promise, and I think the compound they have has tremendous promise," Hughes told me last week in a phone interview. "My concern is that they don't have the right team to do it."
But Burns says the company is hiring researchers, and setting up a 3,000-square-foot lab in Cambridge's Kendall Square. Earlier this month, the company raised $4.3 million in a private placement stock sale. "2004 should be a pretty exciting time," says Carver.
In the 1920s and 1930s, Cambridge was one of the world's candy capitals, with more than 30 confectionary companies within the city limits. Today, only one remains: the Tootsie Roll plant on Main Street.
But the area hasn't lost its interest in sugar.
Scott Kirsner is a contributing editor at Fast Company. He can be reached at skirsner@verizon.net.
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