Monday, January 14, 2008

Biomed Notebook

Heywoods' 'PatientsLikeMe' builds web presence

By Ryan McBride

Benjamin Heywood would like to know whether his 1-year-old daughter has asthma, he said, but he doesn't like her doctor's plan to diagnose the respiratory illness by seeing whether she responds to an asthma drug. While asthma is a milder malady than those suffered by users of PatientsLikeMe Inc., it's the type of problem that Heywood's Cambridge startup helps users to solve: The online community of patients is intended to help people find the best treatments for their diseases.

PatientsLikeMe is known in some circles because of the Heywood family's well-chronicled effort to find new drugs for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease, a rare and mysterious neurological disorder that afflicted Heywood's brother, Stephen Heywood, from the late 1990s until his death in 2006 (Stephen died in an accident, not from complications of the disease, according to the family). Influenced by Stephen's illness, Benjamin said he, his brother James Heywood, and their friend Jeff Cole founded the startup in 2004 to unite patients with "life-changing" diseases, he said.

"We really try to go deep into what's relevant to patients in managing their disease," said Benjamin Heywood, president of the firm. Patients in the community provide such information as the treatments they take and measurements of their disease states.

The 15-person company launched its first online community, for people with Lou Gehrig's disease, in March 2006, Heywood said. It followed with communities focused on multiple sclerosis and Parkinson's disease in April 2007, and with a fourth, for HIV/AIDs, in November 2007. An online venue for patients with such mood disorders as depression and anxiety is slated to launch in the first quarter of 2008.

Still, Heywood said his revenue strategy to aggregate and sell information from the website to drug companies and medical devices firms, giving them insights into the lives and health of patients, remains a work in progress. The company is also working on ways for patients and industry to talk about the use of medical products in the real world.

While the company builds out its patient communities, a number of newer firms have sprouted to build similar medical-information websites -- all in PatientsLikeMe's own backyard. WeGo Health, of Cambridge, formed in early 2007 and has since launched a website that strives to cull the "best health information" from the plethora of medical info on the Internet.

Heywood said he hasn't decided whether WeGo and others are competitors of PatientsLikeMe, since his firm offers patients different types of data. However, he said, the companies that survive will be those that deliver the most value to patients and customers in the life sciences industry, which many of these firms have targeted as their main source of income.

But Heywood is used to competitive businesses. He said he spent several years as a production assistant and then development executive in the movie industry, after earning an MBA from the University of California Los Angeles. His film credits include an appearance in the 2006 documentary "So Much So Fast," which chronicled brother Stephen's battle with Lou Gehrig's disease.

In fact, the Heywoods are apt to build things, whether its companies or automotive engines. John Heywood, James' and Benjamin's father, is a professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and director of the Sloan Automotive Lab at MIT, according to the institute. Both James and Benjamin earned mechanical engineering degrees from MIT.

The family was also the organizational builder of the ALS Therapy Development Institute, a Cambridge nonprofit focused on the discovery of new treatments for Lou Gehrig's disease, which now employs 30 scientists.

In a hallway at the Kendall Square office of PatientsLikeMe, James Heywood, who serves as company chairman, recalled Stephen Heywood's talent for architecture and carpentry when talking about a carriage house in Newton he and Stephen had restored together. "(Stephen) was such a great architect," James said.