Article from the Baltimore Business Journal on PharmAthene's contract situation with the gov't:
baltimore.bizjournals.com
Putting science on hold
While the feds mull what to do with bioterror research funds, an Annapolis biotech sweats it out
Baltimore Business Journal - February 10, 2006 by Robert J. Terry Staff
David Wright is waiting on the federal government. And waiting.
It's a frustrating position for the CEO of PharmAthene, the Annapolis biotechnology company backed with $50 million in venture capital to develop new defenses in the war on bioterror.
Wright is waiting for word on a lucrative contract award from the government that could kickstart PharmAthene's year. As much as $20 million could come the company's way for Protexia, a treatment for exposure to nerve agents, perhaps this quarter.
Wright also is waiting to learn the status of a request for proposals issued by the feds for new anthrax treatments. PharmAthene, which develops vaccines for killer agents such as anthrax, botulinum toxin and smallpox, is collaborating with publicly held Medarex Corp. to develop Valortim, a monoclonal antibody in Phase I clinical trials.
All the waiting means Wright -- who has held executive positions with some of this region's most successful life sciences companies, including MedImmune -- has had to put plans to pump $8 million into manufacturing on hold. He will need to pull together another financing round, probably in the next six months.
"We've made a lot of progress over the last year, but we have a long way to go," he said.
Wall Street and investment banks are still interested in what PharmAthene is doing, despite the uncertainty, Wright said. But some of his backers are getting anxious.
Relying on the feds
In his 2003 State of the Union address, with the post-9/11 anthrax attacks of two years before still fresh in many people's minds, President Bush launched his push for billions of dollars in federal funding to develop and stockpile a range of vaccines and treatments against these lethal pathogens.
Project BioShield was eventually approved by Congress and signed into law, and a biodefense cluster was born. Companies were looking to tap into the $5.6 billion set aside by the government to fund drug development work.
PharmAthene was quickly tapped as a company to watch. Its science, rooted at the Harvard University Medical School, uses a highly purified, genetically engineered protein technology called recombinant PA to prevent the proteins in anthrax's lethal toxins from binding to cells and opening them up to infection. |
