boston.com
Infinity adds improvisation to drug quest
By Scott Kirsner | July 11, 2005
Steve Holtzman, chief executive of Infinity Pharmaceuticals, sometimes compares the act of developing drugs to playing great jazz.
In jazz, brilliant improvisers are allowed to do their thing. And Holtzman believes the same ought to be true in biotechnology, when a combo of innovative scientists is assembled. The jazz metaphor even extends to the lunchroom at Infinity's Cambridge headquarters, which is designed to look like a jazz cafe, complete with a colorful mural featuring Billie Holliday and John Coltrane.
Holtzman's improvisational approach is about to be tested, as clinical trials for Infinity's first drug, designed to combat an especially deadly form of cancer called multiple myeloma, start this month.
Unlike most jazz musicians, Infinity hasn't struggled financially. The company has raised $135 million from venture capital firms and corporate partners like Amgen, Novartis, and Johnson & Johnson. Attracting that much money has ensured that lots of people in the Boston biotech community have been following Infinity's progress closely. They've wondered whether what seemed like a loosely organized jam session that brought together celebrated life-sciences figures like Eric Lander of the Broad Institute and Stuart Schreiber of Harvard University would coalesce into something substantial.
Around the time of the company's founding in 2001, Infinity's press releases riffed about ''changing drug discovery to bring important new medicines to patients," without offering many specifics.
The company intended to apply leading-edge technologies to analyzing large libraries of potential drugs, an approach that sounded a bit like proposing to take the most advanced metal detectors to the world's wealthiest beaches, in the hopes of unearthing lots of Rolexes.
Later, the company began to focus more explicitly on cancer, and in 2003, Infinity hired Julian Adams away from Millennium Pharmaceuticals in Cambridge, making Adams its chief scientific officer. A recent Forbes magazine article referred to Adams as ''one of the world's most creative medicinal chemists," citing him as ''proof that, despite the fancy technologies and computers used today in drug discovery, individual scientists can still make the difference between blockbuster and bust."
At Millennium, Adams had helped bring the drug Velcade to market. (That drug also treats multiple myeloma, a cancer of the bone marrow.) When he joined Infinity, he brought along an interest in a type of protein called a heat-shock protein. This particular protein, HSP-90, seemed instrumental in helping cancer cells stay alive. Research done at the National Cancer Institute found that a naturally occurring antibiotic, geldanamycin, could prevent HSP-90 from performing this life-support function, causing cancer cells to die.
Millennium hadn't encouraged Adams to pursue his interest in heat-shock proteins. ''There was too much in the pipeline," he says, referring to other promising drugs being developed at Millennium.
But at Infinity, executives were feeling increasing pressure to come up with a first drug candidate for clinical trials, and the metal detector approach didn't seem to be turning up much interest. ''We decided that was going to take too long to get into the clinic," Holtzman says. Infinity needed to change the tempo, and Adams was just the player to help do that. ''When Julian joined, we said, 'Are there cases where nature has provided a chemical insight about how you can intervene, but where the natural product is not a good drug candidate?'
Transforming geldanamycin into an effective drug that patients would be able to tolerate wasn't easy. ''We said, maybe we could alter the molecule in a very non-obvious way," Adams says. ''The literature said we couldn't do this particular transformation and maintain a stable molecule."
But they did, and that molecule was dubbed IPI-504, Infinity's first drug candidate.
Coincidentally, Adams expects IPI-504 to be especially helpful in situations when a cancer develops a resistance to a drug like Velcade. Already, Infinity has performed experiments with living myeloma cells taken from patients who either didn't respond to Velcade, or responded initially but then became resistant to the drug. The results, Adams says, look promising, and he thinks there may also be potential in treating drug-resistant breast cancers or leukemia.
Infinity has two rivals in the race to gain approval for the first drugs that would block heat-shock proteins: Kosan BioSciences and Conforma Corp., California companies which have both begun their clinical trials. Kosan seems furthest along. ''Admittedly, we have some catch-up to do," Adams says.
Infinity has 100 employees, and according to chief business officer Adelene Perkins, the company aims to file one new drug application with the Food and Drug Administration each year.
But can a jazz-inspired strategy help Infinity achieve that sort of routine and predictable productivity? Infinity still has a big audience, and a lot to prove.
''There tends to be jealousy," Holtzman acknowledges, ''when you raise a lot of money in the midst of a tough market, as we did. People may root for you to fail, but I don't worry about it. The competition is the disease, and that's the way I've always felt about it."
Spotting infections,colorfullyMitch Sanders, president of ECI Biotech, reports he's in the homestretch of closing what would be a significant financing round for the 10-person Worcester company: $2.5 million. That's on top of $2.5 million the company has raised since its founding in 1998, much of it from Collaborative Seed and Growth Partners in Newton.
ECI's tiny, inexpensive sensors are intended for use in consumer and medical products, as well as in packaging. What if a package of chicken could tell the grocery clerk salmonella was present, or dental floss could alert you to gingivitis, or a bandage could let you know if a child's cut was developing an infection? ECI's sensors would change color to indicate the presence of bacteria; the goal, Sanders says, is for them to add only a few pennies to the cost of a product.
''We're only about a year away from launching our first products," Sanders says. He won't be specific about what they might be, except to hint, ''Johnson & Johnson is a client to whom we provide services."
Bacterially aware Band-Aids, perhaps?
Scott Kirsner is a contributing editor at Fast Company. He can be reached at kirsner@pobox.com. |
