CONX mentioned in Indianapolis Business Journal:
St. Francis starts business
Breakthrough by hospital researcher could lead to autoimmune-disease diagnostic tools
Sat. February 16 - 2008
By J.K. Wall - jwall@ibj.com
IBJ staff
John McIntyre remembers well the day he made a crucial observation that led to forming his own company.
It was Sept. 11, 2001.
On that day McIntyre, director of a blood lab at St. Francis Hospital in Beech Grove, found a strain of antibodies in a vial of blood from a patient with sepsis.
That discovery led him to develop a process that could help doctors identify autoimmune diseases, or sicknesses that develop when a person’s immune system attacks his own body.
Now, McIntyre has partnered with St. Francis to launch Redox Reactive Reagents LLC. The two-year-old company is negotiating with multiple makers of autoimmune test kits and could have its first commercial product on the market this year.
St. Francis’ launch of the company, which goes by the abbreviation 3R, marks the first time in recent memory that research at a hospital has spawned a new for-profit company for central Indiana’s life sciences industry. To date, most life sciences startups have been spun out of major corporations, such as locally based Eli Lilly and Co. or Roche Diagnostics (which has its North American headquarters here), or started by researchers at Indiana and Purdue universities.
“We’ve seen spinouts from Lilly; we’ve seen spinouts from universities; we’ve seen spinouts from Roche. It makes sense that we’re now seeing spinouts from the hospitals,” said David Johnson, CEO of BioCrossroads, an Indianapolis economic development group focused on life sciences.
But it seems hospitals are intent on becoming bigger players. In January, Clarian Health formally kicked off a $25 million venture-capital fund, in part to commercialize research conducted by its doctors and scientists. Its system, the state’s largest, includes Methodist Hospital, IU Hospital and Riley Hospital for Children.
There’s been even more activity by hospital systems around the Midwest, said Kevin Etzkorn, managing director of Heron Capital, an Indianapolis life sciences venture-capital fund.
The Cleveland Clinic has launched multiple companies based on its research. So has the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. And St. Louis-based Ascension Health operates a $200 million venture capital fund. It aims to invest in medical device, technology or services firms. Ascension owns St. Vincent Health, Indianapolis’ second-largest hospital chain.
But Etzkorn said St. Francis’ launch of 3R is unusual.
“With regard to the smaller community hospitals, it’s far less common,” he said.
Indianapolis’ hospitals made their biggest contribution to BioCrossroads’ efforts in 2004 when they co-founded the Indiana Health Information Exchange. The exchange is a not-for-profit entity that makes patient information available as needed to doctors and hospitals throughout central Indiana. Clarian, St. Francis and St. Vincent joined with Community Health Network, and Wishard Health Services to help found the exchange.
3R started as a 50/50 partnership between McIntyre and St. Francis. The hospital’s parent organization, Mishawaka-based Sisters of St. Francis, has so far paid 3R’s expenses, such as its work to secure patents in the United States and around the world.
“Our motivation as a hospital, obviously, is to support the science,” said St. Francis CEO Bob Brody. “But longer range, if this is as successful a venture as indicated at this early stage, there is the potential for us to develop a revenue stream, a supplemental revenue stream for the organization, which may become important for our health care ministry.”
McIntyre has not invested money into the company, but has invested significant personal time, including many nights and weekends, he said.
What McIntyre has found is that all people have autoantibodies, or proteins that, instead of fighting bacteria and viruses, attack a person’s own body. In fact, he asserts that a healthy person’s antibodies convert into autoantibodies for a time to fight an infection and then convert back into antibodies.
But patients develop autoimmune diseases when their antibodies convert into autoantibodies and, for some reason, get stuck in a body-attacking mode.
McIntyre has figured out a way to get autoantibodies to convert back into harmless antibodies.
“We can reverse it,” said McIntyre, 65, who also is a professor of biology at IUPUI. “I can take those antibodies into the lab and shut them down.”
He also has treated healthy blood to make it develop autoantibodies. That patented process underlies the technology that 3R intends to sell to companies that make kits to test blood for various autoimmune diseases.
Such test kits need to assure their accuracy by using a blood sample that does have autoantibodies, known as a positive control. The only way to get such blood now is to draw it from a sick patient. Not all sick patients are eager—or even able—to give blood. So supplies of blood are limited and, therefore, expensive.
3R officials think McIntyre’s process can produce blood with autoantibodies in greater quantities and for less money.
“The positive controls for test kits is obviously low-hanging fruit,” said David Doyle, a former banker and investment manager, who sits on 3R’s advisory board. He estimates the U.S. test kit market to be $20 million. “There’s not a huge market, but it is still a viable cash flow.”
McIntyre declined to name the companies with which 3R is negotiating. Companies that make test kits for autoantibodies include Abbott Laboratories and smaller companies, such as Buffalo-based Immco Diagnostics, Colorado-based Corgenix Medical Corp., and California-based CalBiotech Inc.
McIntyre doesn’t plan to stop with blood-test kits, however. He said the presence or absence of autoantibodies could also be used as an early indicator for Alzheimer’s disease or to assess a person’s risk for developing cancer or diabetes.
3R officials said they are now talking with a major pharmaceutical company about licensing 3R’s technology for use in Alzheimer’s studies.
“Most Alzheimer’s tests are cognitive; they are very subjective,” said one of McIntyre’s fellow researchers, Dawn Wagenknecht. “This would be more objective.”
Wagenknecht works under McIntyre managing the HLA-Vascular Biology Laboratory at St. Francis. It tests blood to make sure the immune system of a patient won’t reject a bone-marrow transplant from a donor.
McIntyre decided to publicize 3R’s work now, because the company is trying to raise $1.5 million to develop its technology into a marketable product.
“You have all kinds of ramifications that you can go after,” he said. |
