Though the firm featured in this story is not itself SBIR involved, the previous company started and managed by the principal of the firm - Stanley Rose (see photo) - had been program active with $323M of NIH SBIR funding. As noted in the article, that firm - NimbleGen out of Madison WI - was acquired by Roche in 2007. Personal circumstances - the need for a kidney transplant himself - has led to start-up of another small firm by Dr Rose, not yet - or perhaps ever - SBIR-active, But the key point in posting this story as a Home Pager is that within the talent pool that collectively is SBIR are many others like Dr Rose who are also doing other potentially game-changing things. As important as - perhaps more so than - the SBIR projects selected for funding is the fact that their being program involved reveals a depth and diversity of expertise that is extraordinary. Is it not time that we worked also to engage that talent, to provide opportunity for effective drawdown of the value it has created and is capable of creating?
Date: Jul 18, 2014 Author: Don Seiffert Source: bizjournals (
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There are a lot of companies developing gene-based diagnostic tests for oncology, including Cambridge-based Foundation Medicine, one of last year's most successful healthcare IPOs. Now one Brookline resident is looking to do the same in the field of organ transplants.
Stanley Rose, president and CEO of Transplant Genomics, is himself a recipient of a kidney transplant in January 2011, as well as former CEO of Madison, Wis.-based NimbleGen Systems, a microarray-products company that was acquired by Roche in 2007. But in an interview this week, Rose said he got the idea for the company while reading a cover story in Clinical Laboratory News in December 2012. That article reads in part:
"About half of transplanted kidneys fail within 10 years, and patients with failed transplants of all types make up a sizable presence on the waiting list for new organs, a vexing challenge given that the number of people in need of organs far exceeds the supply, with more than 100,000 currently on the transplant waiting list. Experts in the field say validated biomarkers are essential to improving long-term patient and graft outcomes."
Rose said he took away three thoughts from the article. First, that the existing technology to help his doctor monitor how the transplant is doing is "really poor." Second, that the technology exists to better guide a doctor's treatments, and third, that "it's a pretty large opportunity" to help thousands of patients like himself.
He went to the database of grant recipients for from National Institutes of Health working on organ transplant diagnostic biomarkers and the first name that came up alphabetically was Michael Abecassis of Northwestern Medicine. It turned out Rose knew Abecassis through an organ donation foundation, and he sent an email that day. Abecassis wrote back that he'd had the same idea, which started the ball rolling for Transplant Genomics. The company was incorporated in March of last year, and has received $3 million in angel investments so far. Earlier this week, it made its first public announcement when it said it has acquired a license for the patents for the technology.
Rose said that while the company just a year old, it's further along than an ordinary startup.
"It's not like we started with an idea and then worked to develop it," he said. Rather, the technology was already developed by Abecassis and the third co-founder, Daniel Salomon of The Scripps Research Institute.
Rose said there are about 17,000 kidney transplants every year, and 175,000 living recipients like him. "Every one of them is at risk every day," he said. (The kidney by far the most common type of organ transplanted, followed by the liver, pancreas, lung and heart, he said.) Yet the technology used to monitor how a transplant is faring is 30 years old, he said, and based on measuring the levels of creatinine, a waste product generated by the kidneys.
But by the time dangerous levels of creatinine are detected, significant damage has already been done, said Rose. What his company has developed is a test that looks at a collection of specific genes thatcan be used to classify kidney donor recipients as stable, experiencing acute rejection, or those who have acute dysfunction but not rejection. The distinction is critically important, said Rose, as patients who are rejecting their kidneys need to be treated with more immunosupressants, while those with ADNR need to actually decrease immunosupressants, he said.
Rose said that the company is in the process of hiring people, but so far has operated virtually, split between his home in Brookline, and sites near the labs of the other two co-founders in San Diego and Chicago. He said the company is already sponsoring research tests at undisclosed locations. Although he said the U.S. Food and Drug Administration doesn't currently regulate such diagnostic products actively, the company needs to show the test works in order to qualify for insurance reimbursements. He said he plans to launch the test commercially next year.
