Health Care

2013 Leaders in Health Care, Innovation in Biopharmaceuticals

By Gianni Truzzi February 28, 2013

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This article originally appeared in the March 2013 issue of Seattle magazine.

WINNER:

Alder Biopharmaceuticals
For frequent sufferers of migraines, current therapies can be as troublesome as the debilitating headaches. They would have to be taking drugs all the time, explains Alder Biopharmaceuticals CEO Randall Schatzman, and also deal with the toxicity and side effects that go with them.

For its ALD403 drug, Alder engineers migraine-preventing antibodies that can occupy the body for weeks. Antibodies are Y-shaped molecules that bind to what the human immune system sees as threatssuch as invading bacteria. The antibodies of ALD403 target a key neuropeptide that helps signal the brain to stop the blood vessel constriction that causes migraine pain.

Bothell-based Alder is still in the developmental stage, as yet unable to license a commercial product, but its migraine treatment marks its second antibody drug to enter Phase II clinical trials. An antibody to treat inflammation in rheumatoid arthritis and cancer has also shown promising results. While this is a tricky period for most pharmaceutical startups, Alder has attracted comfortable backing from venture capital, including support from Bristol-Myers Squibb.

These products are an advantageous outcome of Alders distinctive approach to manufacturing and engineering therapeutic antibodies, using yeast instead of mammalian cells. The process is much faster, taking weeks instead of months, thus enabling a much larger scale of production. For ailments that are suffered by millions, Alders methods can theoretically meet those needs at an affordable cost.

Schatzman notes, That allows us to get into markets where we know pricing pressures are going to be an issue and may have been a block in the past. The process is so efficient, he believes, that many of the new drug therapies Alder produces will be able to compete on price with generic versions of more established therapies.

SILVER AWARDS:

OncoGenex Pharmaceuticals
Most cancer patients develop some resistance to chemotherapy, a problem Bothell-based OncoGenex is dedicated to helping solve. After successive treatments, or even before treatment, many cancer cells begin to overproduce one of several possible cell-survival proteins, making them more drug resistant. The company has developed two promising compounds (Custirsen and OGX-427), currently in clinical trials, which target those proteins so conventional drug therapies can do their work.

Adaptive
Biotechnologies Corporation
This Seattle research company, led in part by two young sibling cofounders, was spun off from Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and has quickly become a leader in the field of genomic immunology, a key part of cancer research. Its technology is expected to help researchers analyze and catalog far more of the 100 million immunity-aiding T-cell receptors than previously possible, in order to develop more effective medicines for disorders like diabetes and leukemia.

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