Biotech "restarts" with focus on brain disorders, drugs
By Luke Timmerman
Seattle Times business reporter
Biotechnology companies run into trouble and reinvent themselves so often that there's a term for it. It's called a "restart."
Nura, a small Seattle company studying genetics of the brain, has gotten that sort of second chance. With a new management team, strategy and name, it has raised $9.5 million to reignite research into new drugs against diseases like Alzheimer's.
Nura got its boost a year after taking over the assets of Primal, another early-stage Seattle biotech, which burned through more than $30 million before it ran out of money.
With a fresh business plan, Nura has attracted a high-profile crew of venture investors: Arch Venture Partners, Vulcan, the Swiss firm Aravis, Novartis Venture Fund and Linkagene. Nura represents the first local investment in a year under Vulcan's new director of biotech investing, Michael Kranda. The company has also secured $1 million of taxpayer money from the National Institutes of Health for research into anxiety.
Patrick Gray, one of the early scientists at Genentech and Icos, has been installed as the chief executive, and Mark Benjamin, a dealmaker from Rosetta Inpharmatics, is the chief business officer. George Gaitanaris, a co-founder and chief scientist of Primal, has those same roles at Nura. The scientific advisory board includes big names from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif.
The company does not plan to expand its lab space or buy expensive new equipment. It currently has 18 employees, including 15 who had worked at Primal. The company plans to hire a few more but remain lean in its early years.
Primal's founding idea was to build a catalog of biological markers found on cells in regions of the mouse brain that control behavior problems such as schizophrenia and depression. The thinking was that those markers were similar to ones in humans and could become targets for new drugs. Big drug companies would pay for information about them, and allow the small company to co-develop drugs, Primal's founders thought.
But like most startup genetic-information companies at the time, Primal found that selling genetic information to other companies wasn't a viable business model.
The new strategy at Nura is built around a database of more than 200 biological markers in the brain, and particularly about a dozen that it wants to test as targets for drug development, both in neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's, and behavioral problems like obesity.
Over the next two years, the company hopes to show in animal tests that hitting the targets with a drug can treat the disease. If all goes according to plan, the company could then have enough evidence to start testing in humans.
Gray said the company believes its targets are valuable, because they are similar to other targets that have been proven useful for treating depression, pain and schizophrenia.
The company has run experiments in animals that are genetically engineered to lack a certain gene. It then observed whether the alteration changed their behavior, by, for example, making them more or less anxious. If researchers see benefits in these so-called "knockout" mice, they can try to create a drug to turn the gene off and treat the disease in normal mice.
In one example, Gray said, the company knocked out a gene linked with obesity. When fed the same amount of food as normal mice, the "knockout" mice were 14 percent leaner after 12 weeks. The next step will be to find a drug that can turn off that gene in mice, and show the same effect, without damaging side effects.
Robert Nelsen, managing director with Arch Venture Partners in Seattle, said Nura has potential because it matches promising technology with skilled management and patient investors.
The trend in biotech investing has favored companies with drugs in late stages of human testing, with a chance of reaching the market soon. But Nelsen said he likes Nura, even though its potential payoff lies much further in the future, because it won't be wedded to one high-stakes gamble that might fail.
"Even though Nura is focused on drugs, it's going to be a long time before we have some, so you have to be in this for the long haul," Nelsen said.
Vulcan's Kranda, along with Nelsen and Aravis' Jean-Philippe Tripet, will join the company's board of directors. Nelsen said that Vulcan, which has tried to become more disciplined in its investing after the tech bust, spent weeks thoroughly scrutinizing Nura's business plan before it decided to invest. Kranda declined to comment.
Chris Somogyi, an early investor in Primal, said he hopes the new team can breathe new life into the company. "I'm bummed that Primal in its original format needed to go through this, but I'm glad to see the idea is not dead," he said.
Nura
Located: Seattle's First Hill
Founded: 2003
Employees: 18
CEO: Patrick Gray
Investors: Arch Venture Partners, Aravis, Vulcan, Novartis Venture Fund, Linkagene
What it does: Discovers and develops drugs for neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's. Also researching genetic links to 20 common behavioral disorders such as obesity, schizophrenia, sexual disorders, depression and drug addiction.
Status: At least two years away from moving into human tests
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