Shire Hunts More Deals Amid Reawakening Interest in Stem Cell R&D

Alliance for Regenerative Medicine are saying what we really need right now are a couple of Phase 3 trials with demonstrated success.”

The Washington, D.C.-based alliance, the chief organizer of the investor and partnering forum, was founded in 2009 to represent a variety of stakeholders—including research groups, life sciences companies, patient advocates, and others—and to focus on the obstacles to commercialization of regenerative medicine technologies, according to Michael Werner, executive director for the Alliance for Regenerative Medicine. “What became clear was there was a real need to take discoveries and turn them into products for patients,” Werner told me at the meeting.  Raising capital remains one of the biggest challenges in regenerative medicine, he added, and the forum provides a venue that brings investors and pharmaceutical partners together.

Tozer was a senior executive at Advanced BioHealing, which makes Dermagraft bio-engineered skin patches in San Diego, and is now on the lookout for additional acquisitions that fit with the company’s new strategy in regenerative medicine.

“We spent a lot of time thinking about it after we were acquired by Shire,” Tozer says. What they ultimately saw, he says, was a lot of unmet medical need around diabetes-related complications. A patient with type 1 diabetes, whose pancreas produces little or no insulin, is also susceptible to complications from microvascular deterioration, including loss of sensation (neuropathy), loss of kidney function (nephropathy), and loss of vision (retinopathy).

Dermagraft is used to treat diabetic foot ulcers that often can be serious enough to require amputation. Another product in development, Vascugel, is focused on improving blood vessel repair for patients requiring arteriovenous (AV) access, often related to dialysis.

“A lot of these problems have a lot of work going on now in regenerative medicine,” Tozer says. “It’s now one area of principal focus [at Shire] in terms of licensing and potential acquisitions.

“The biggest thing that we’re trying to get out is that we’re open for business now [in regenerative medicine],” Tozer says. “The Advanced BioHealing deal is about 18 months behind us, and we’re looking for new partnering and licensing deals.”

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.