Lisa McKerracher, of BioAxone Therapeutic Inc., won the Christopher Reeve medal in 2000 for her work on spinal-cord injuries. Each year, about 15,000 North Americans suffer such injuries, and BioAxone has had promising results in early-stage research.
Lisa McKerracher's directions were excellent and finding BioAxone Therapeutic Inc. proved to be easy.
Just wander out back of the main building at the Université de Montréal and enter from the loading area. The business is housed in utilitarian spaces, on different floors, scattered among medical classrooms.
The little 2-year-old company might not look like much yet, but its science was sound enough to attract $11.5 million in financing from four venture-capital firms - a pretty good haul, considering the company set out to raise $7 million.
BioAxone is determined to find a way to restore movement following a spinal-cord injury.
Right now, little can be done for the 15,000 people in North America who suffer spinal-cord injuries each year. Most are men, under 30 years of age, who have been injured as the result of an accident. "They are being told to live with it," McKerracher said.
Big pharmaceutical companies have not shown much interest because the market is relatively small and there's not a lot of money to be made, she said, "but spinal-cord injury has an enormous impact because the personal cost is very high."
Young people are "paralyzed for the rest of their life," she pointed out, "and they have a normal life span because of improvements in medical technology."
For a long time it was believed that once the lines of communication between the brain and the spine - called axons - had been damaged, they could not be repaired.
McKerracher, however, did post-doctoral studies with Albert Aguayo, who is head of the Centre for Research in Neuroscience at McGill University and who wasn't convinced that the lines of communication couldn't be restored. In 2000 they won the Christopher Reeve Medal - named for the actor who portrayed Superman in the movies but was paralyzed in a riding accident in 1995 - for studies indicating there is no intrinsic reason why axons cannot
be regenerated.
It's a question of environment, the pair found. There are proteins within the central nervous system that inhibit growth and block axon regeneration. McKerracher found that when the spinal cord is injured, a signaling molecule called Rho is abnormally activated. So BioAxone developed Cethrin, a patented therapeutic protein designed to inactivate Rho. When Rho is turned off, the axons ignore the growth inhibitors and begin to regenerate.
BioAxone's early studies show Cethrin can restore hind-limb movement in some animals and might also limit cell damage surrounding the injury.
But it's a long and costly leap from proving something works in animals to proving it can do the same in humans.
The funds the company has just raised will get it through its next round of testing, which concentrates on the safety of the drug and ensures it is not toxic. But once the major human trials begin, BioAxone will have to seek a partner, McKerracher said, since it doesn't have the money or the expertise to go it alone.
And McKerracher is offering no predictions on when the company will be ready to bring a product to market. Though pleasant and chatty, she's new to the world of business. She's spent most of her career in academia. She knows promotion is a part of doing business, but she's eager to avoid hype.
She receives correspondence from people who have suffered spinal-cord injuries, or their loved ones. She has to tell them the research BioAxone is doing is directed at people who have just been injured, not those already in wheelchairs. Along the way, researchers are picking up information that will be helpful when they tackle old injuries, she said, but that won't happen for some time.
And the company will be tackling areas other than spinal-cord injuries.
"There's so much commonality of mechanism between brain and spinal cord that anything you discover in the spinal cord will have other applications in the central nervous system." McKerracher said. "We have some early proof-of-principle studies that our therapy would also be interesting in strokes. Both have abnormal activation of Rho."
Investors were also attracted by the company's ability to develop therapeutic small molecules.
But whatever BioAxone pursues, it will have to be in keeping with the company's businessplan, she said. That's one lesson she has learned in jumping to business from academe.
As a university researcher, one is motivated by curiosity and pursues avenues that open unexpectedly. As a businessperson, however, she has to avoid being sidetracked.
BioAxone is actually what is known as a university spinoff. The company is founded on research done at the Université de Montréal that the university has allowed to be commercialized in return for a percentage of the company and royalties. Such ventures can become an important source of income, she said, there are universities in the U.S. that make millions of dollars from their spinoffs.
McKerracher had dabbled a bit in business before launching BioAxone in 2000, and there is one lesson she quickly learned: scientists are not necessarily good businesspeople. So BioAxone was created as a partnership between herself and businessman Pierre Caouette, who was a friend and sailing partner at the time, but is now her husband.
Together they came up with $250,000 to launch the company, including her share of the prize money for the Christopher Reeve Medal, which came to $25,000 U.S. - "a lot of money for a university professor," she said.
The company was also able to obtain seed financing through MedTech Partners/Neuroscience Development Inc. The original commitment was for $600,000, she said, but BioAxone had used only half that amount when it decided it was far enough along to turn to the venture capital market.
There was a lot of interest - "It was almost like an auction," she said -and the company ended up raising more than it expected from T2C2/Bio 2000, the Quebec Federation of Labour's Solidarity Fund, Investissements Desjardins and Innovatech of Montreal.
Bernard Coupal, head of T2C2, said the company met all the criteria his fund looks for: good science and a respected scientist, its intellectual property is protected by patents, and the market potential for its products is good.
While the company has enough money, McKerracher found she didn't have enough
time, so she has taken a leave of absence from her teaching duties at the university.
In the next few months the company, which has 12 full-time and one part-time employee, hopes to hire a chief executive familiar with the biotechnology industry to replace Caouette, who is the part-timer. It plans to take on four more employees, but is currently restricted by space.
So finding a new home is a priority. McKerracher said the company has been looking at the biotech building under way at the old Angus rail yards in Rosemont, which will offer individual space as well as shared facilities like boardrooms, animal laboratories and a cafeteria.
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