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Anterion Therapeutics Inc. is a rare breed in the cash-hungry biotechnology world: It has managed to stay afloat despite raising only $900,000 in outside money since the company was incorporated in 2003.
The Salem-based company has a number of late-stage biotech assets, including a potential three-year contraceptive and a cholesterol-lowering drug target that could be an alternative to well-known statin drugs like Lipitor. But Anterion is going to need a big infusion of cash, either from new investors, or from a lucrative deal with a big pharma company.
While some small public biotechs crashed and burned with the stock market dive, scores of private companies have stayed afloat with small installments of cash. But the recession has significantly slowed the pace of their research, after potential funders lost their shirts on Wall Street.
Anterion lay dormant from its incorporation in 2003 until 2007. At that time, a group of 10 investors, led by angel investor Richard Millian, put some seed money into the company.
“The thought, at the time, was to keep it to a small handful of investors, so we wouldn’t dilute our investments too much. But then, the stock market crashed,” Millian said. He said angel and other private investments dried up completely.
Since then, Anterion has inched along with its drug discovery platform that both develops new drugs and creates a new market opportunity for existing drugs, by reformulating them into long-acting medications delivered under the skin.
“Basically, any drug that you take every day, at a consistent dose, could be reformulated this way,” Millian said.
The company’s drug target for a long-acting female contraceptive is called Annuelle. It comes in the form of capsules the size of a grain of rice. It doesn’t require an incision or stitches, and the capsules dissolve after all of their enclosed hormones have been dispensed. Anterion officials say the process is an improvement over an older-generation product, Norplant.
“Norplant was a grisly process to implant and remove, and it resulted in a wide array of class action lawsuits,” said Anterion CEO Bob Leonard. Annuelle can be used for either one or three years depending upon the number, size and shape of the capsules that are implanted. The drug target is ready to enter Phase 3 drug trials, once Anterion gets some funding. Millian thinks the trial will cost $200,000, cheap by biotechnology standards.
The intellectual property for Annuelle was discovered by Leonard many years ago, and through company failures, mergers and acquisitions, Leonard got it back, in-licensing the drug candidate into Anterion in 2007.
Leonard said he then discovered that Annuelle lowered patients’ LDL, or “bad cholesterol,” contrary to common wisdom that similar contraceptives actually raise cholesterol. Researchers figured out it was a lipid added to the hormone, not the hormones themselves, that had the cholesterol-lowering effect, and now Anterion is developing a cholesterol-lowering drug made up of just the lipid, called Choless.
The company is awaiting the go-ahead from the Food and Drug Administration to start the Phase 2 trial on Choless and is conducting additional studies to find out how the drug is absorbed by the body, upon request from the FDA.
Both Millian, who serves as a company vice president, and Leonard are working for no salaries. There are no other employees and all scientific work is outsourced. But the company is unlikely to score that long-awaited partnership with a pharmaceutical company until those absorption studies are finished.
“Pharma wants data. We have a number of confidentiality agreements with companies, but no deals yet,” Millian said.
Millian said the recession changed Anterion’s investment strategy, and now he is actively seeking venture capital funding. During 2009, he said, there were no bites. But now, Millian said he sees a thaw in the capital crunch. Not only are VCs returning his calls, but some are reaching out to him first, he said.
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