QED Funding

Success Stories - Science Center

Avid Radiopharmaceuticals –
Vision into Debilitating Neuro Disease

Avid Radiopharmaceuticals is a molecular imaging company with significant expertise and intellectual property in the field of molecular brain imaging.  The company’s mission is to develop new molecular imaging agents capable of changing the medical management of significant chronic human diseases.  Avid has assembled an industry-leading management team with extensive imaging and CNS drug development experience to help make pre-symptomatic disease detection a reality.

Avid’s proprietary targeting agents will allow radiologists to image amyloid plaques, and the company is currently testing these compounds in clinical trials for the detection of Alzheimer’s disease.  In human trials, the company has demonstrated the proof of mechanism with these agents.  The Avid team is also developing novel agents targeted to the vesicular monoamine transporter (VMAT-2) to image pathology in dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB), Parkinson’s disease (PD), and has recently started a research project in diabetes mellitus (DM).  These agents all have the potential to revolutionize early diagnosis and monitoring of disease.

Avid’s pipeline of imaging compounds has the potential to dramatically alter the clinical course of Alzheimer’s disease, dementia, Parkinson’s disease, and diabetes.  This is possible because of Avid’s molecular imaging compounds may be able to detect the first stages of pathological change, allowing early treatment and management of people at risk – before symptoms of disease can develop.

Avid came to the Science Center in 2005 when CEO and President Daniel Skovronsky, M.D., Ph.D. established the company as a spin-out from the University of Pennsylvania.  As a graduate student at Penn, he has worked on the project since 1999.  After licensing the technology from Penn, Skovronsky was daunted by the process of building a facility and purchasing the expensive initial equipment needed to run his company. 

Avid launched in one quarter of an incubator space – large enough for just one person.  Because of Avid’s need for lead bricks and other heavy lead-shielded equipment for radiopharmaceutical testing, the Science Center custom designed a hanging steel support system to elevate the heavy matter.  This was a crucial design aspect that allowed Avid to remain in Philadelphia, close to the many resources offered by Penn, neighboring universities, and nearby businesses.

In five years, Skovronsky hopes to have commercially available agents that will be used all over the world to help select patients for therapy.  He anticipates a product that will be available in neurologists’ offices because there are so many patients with Alzheimer’s, and many cannot get to a major medical center.  The earlier Alzheimer’s patients learn about the condition, the better their chances are for treatment and planning ahead.

Now with 20 employees, Avid’s first-round investors include RK Ventures (New York), BioAdvance (Philadelphia), Lilly Ventures (Indianapolis), and Pfizer Strategic Investor Group.  Its second-round investors included Safeguard Scientifics (Wayne, PA) and Alliance Bernstein ( New York), as well as its first-round investors.

For Integral Molecular, Location is Everything

Integral Molecular develops novel technologies to enable the discovery and development of drugs that target integral membrane proteins.  These proteins are involved directly or indirectly in most major diseases, and comprise nearly half of all existing drug targets, including G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) and ion channels.  Integral’s products are available to both academic and commercial laboratories for use in biomedical research and drug development.

President and Chief Scientific Officer Benjamin Doranz, Ph.D., MBA, co-founded Integral Molecular after winning the Wharton Business Plan Competition in 2001, and came to the Science Center the following year. 

As the company took shape, Doranz had a solid business plan, but no proof of concept or capital required for this critical early step. He looked to Morphotek, another Science Center company that was recently acquired by the Japanese pharma giant Eisai, as an example Integral could follow. He credits the Science Center’s model and nurturing environment for helping the company successfully navigate the early stages. 

The fledgling firm’s initial budget was about $100,000 – which also happened to be the price tag for a key piece of equipment that was urgently needed.  Without the Science Center, which provided shared-access to the equipment in addition to lab space, Doranz would be forced to raise additional funds before getting started.  Starting at the Science Center allowed him to use the equipment on a shared basis and enabled the business to get off the ground earlier.

In addition to infrastructure, the Science Center’s location has enabled Integral Molecular to better collaborate with the University of Pennsylvania and other academic institutions, as well as nearby businesses.  The company regularly hires Drexel University co-op students, and employs interns from Wharton each year.  “We’re located in this community of entrepreneurs and scientists and business people who are all aiming for the same thing, “ says Doranz, “which is to create successful companies.”

Integral takes full advantage of being in the Keystone Opportunity Zone (KOZ), which allows companies to grow without the added burden of city and state taxes for a given period.  This tax break has proven advantageous to Integral, enabling the company to fuel its growth with grant money, and avoid private funding.  Integral has also benefitted from being in the University City Keystone Innovation Zone (KIZ), which is designed to encourage eventual commercialization of products that result from collaborations between academic and commercial organizations in the area.

As the company has expanded to its current level of 15-20 employees, Science Center has accommodated its growth every step of the way -- providing infrastructure, equipment and the flexibility to expand.

At this stage of growth, many life science companies relocate to the suburbs, but Doranz appreciates the option to stay within the city and maintain proximity to Penn, Drexel, Monell and other resources.  So while Integral has reached the maximum capacity of its current space, he plans to remain close to the collaborators, inventors and other resources situated in the city.  Once construction is complete on the Science Center’s new 3711 Market Street building, Integral hopes to move into a new 5-10,000 square foot, state-of-the-art facility.

For now, the company is shifting gears and focusing on the commercialization and associated marketing strategies for its technologies.  With increased funding, more resources, new hires, and additional space from the Science Center, Integral is well-positioned to develop new products and find new applications for its existing technologies.

BioNanomatrix –
Re-igniting the Genome Revolution

Ask anyone ‘in the know’ on the Science Center campus, and chances are pretty good that they will cite one early-stage company in particular as the next big biotech success story to emerge from Market Street.  The company is BioNanomatrix, and its work is poised to radically alter the way clinicians use genetic information to prevent disease.
Labs today are faced with a tsunami of fragmented genetic information – endless combinations of the 23 pairs of chromosomes that make up our genetic blueprint. New markers for myriad conditions, mutations, and a dizzying array of expressions all directly impact clinical outcomes. 

The problem is that current technology does not permit this valuable information to be part of routine diagnostics.  Traditional DNA analysis – which requires months to complete and costs as much as $1 million – takes a highly fragmented approach to unraveling the human genome.  BioNanomatrix founder and Chief Science Officer Han Cao, Ph.D. likens the current method to reading a book in single, disjointed sentences that are out of order, and completely devoid of context.

The complex network of 23 pairs of human chromosomes is what Cao refers to as the “Book of Life.”  It is the ability to read the entire book as it was written – rather than as disjointed sentences – that makes the BioNanomatrix story so unique and compelling.

Cao, a molecular biologist by training, was a post-doctorate fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s gene therapy center who left Penn in 2000 to join the electrical engineering department at Princeton University.  There, he worked on a multi-disciplinary team conducting pioneering research in the field of nanotechnology as part of a Department of Defense project funded by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Project Agency).  Eventually, this team developed the nano-channel array microchip – an incredibly dense slice of silicon that is capable of storing the complete genetic information on as many as 200 people.

Cao’s training in molecular biology, genetics and stem cell research led him to recognize the commercialization potential of this nanotech platform to further human genome research.  In 2003, he licensed the ‘bionanotech’ technology from Princeton, left his position there, and formed BioNanomatrix. 

Today, BioNanomatrix’s technology hinges on nano-channel array chip, which allows very long – intact -- strands of DNA to be analyzed.  The company’s vision is that this revolutionary application of nanotechnology will replace the current month-and-a-million model with a test that takes a mere eight hours and costs around $100.

Working virtually, Cao set out to secure funding for the new venture, and soon attracted angel investment.  He also met Michael Boyce-Jacino, Ph.D., a molecular geneticist who had served as chief science officer with Orchid Biosciences, where he worked with CEO Dale Pfost (who later led Acuity Pharmaceuticals, another Science Center company).  Dr. Boyce-Jacino was impressed with Han Cao’s energy and entrepreneurial spirit, and joined the company as CEO.  

When he came on board, Boyce-Jacino began re-evaluating the company’s business plan, market opportunities and eventual commercialization path.  As a seasoned fund-raiser who had taken a biotech start-up public, he also understood the need to quickly bring in money to ramp up the company’s lab operations.  The company established its beachhead at the Science Center and got to work.

“The challenge at that point was that the technology was so new that people had a hard time judging it,” Boyce-Jacino recalls.  “So we had to determine the best way to present the message to diverse audiences.” 

The resulting message obviously resonated with investors.  Grants and additional investments provided capital to obtain needed equipment, and the company’s location in the Science Center gave them access to research groups at Penn, Thomas Jefferson University, Drexel, and the Wistar Institute.  With money from Ben Franklin Technology Partners and grants from the National Institutes of Health, Boyce-Jacino and Cao set out to prove the technology, expand upon it, file additional intellectual property, and build their team.

In September 2007, the company formed a joint venture with Complete Genomics Inc. (CGI), a high-performance genome sequencing company.  The two received an $8.8 million grant from the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology / Advanced Technology Program (NIST-ATP) to advance the technology.

To make the vision reality, a hardware platform would be required to image the genetic data stored in the chip.  In November, BioNanomatrix announced a collaboration relationship with Agilent.  Together, the companies will develop the platform that combines their respective technologies.  According to Boyce-Jacino, Agilent’s leadership in instrumentation and optics, and global marketing reach, will be key to accelerating commercialization of the resulting product.

Ultimately, BioNanomatrix aims to take what is now expensive and specialized and make it routine and cost-effective.  “Understanding baseline genetic information is the ultimate in preventative medicine,” he claims. 

Boyce-Jacino draws an apt analogy between the BioNanomatrix approach to genetic imaging and the popular Google Maps application.  “Without Google Maps, you only have GPS coordinates,” he explains.  “That’s useful, but humans are visual, contextual beings, and it’s so much easier to go from point A to point B, and to see traffic patterns, construction, and other contextual information when you have a visual representation – a map.  Our technology moves genetic analysis to an imaging platform, and makes it a viable component of routine clinical diagnostics.”