Date: Feb 21, 2015 Author: Richard Piersol Source: Lincoln Journal (
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A veteran biotechnologist, businessman and physician from Nebraska is returning to the corporate arena in California, but he still intends to help build the industry and a new company in his home state.
Dance Biopharm Inc., a privately held California biotechnology company developing inhaled insulin products to treat diabetes, announced the appointment of Dr. J. Tyler Martin of Roca to the new position of president and to the board of directors.
Martin takes more than 20 years of experience in biotechnology to Dance, where he will oversee company operations, reporting to Dr. John Patton, CEO.
In 2013 Martin founded Great Plains Biotechnology, a strategic advisory group for biotechnology companies and investors, his base in Roca.
Great Plains Biotechnology will continue to operate, Martin said.
"Obviously I'm going to spend less time than I was, at least for a period," he said.
There's great potential for biotechnology to thrive in Nebraska, he said, because it's cost-efficient, the manufacturing talent exists here and the environment to build it is here. "It's happening at (the University of Nebraska Medical Center, Nebraska Innovation Campus), Novartis and the animal health groups building up here. There's a raw material to really create a biotech presence and I still intend to do that."
Last summer, Martin joined the board of UNeMed Corp., the technology transfer leader for the University of Nebraska Medical Center.
He will be commuting to California. Dance is not the the only company for which he's working. He's also the CEO of a vaccine startup, Adjuvance Technologies. He remains with that company as chairman of the board and said he intends to build it here. "What really makes sense is for that to do manufacturing here," Martin said. Over the next two years, he will be working with a contract group on Adjuvance, then once it's operational, he intends to build a plant in Nebraska. The product will be a vaccine adjuvant. The way vaccines work, an adjuvant stimulates the body's reaction to an antigen.
"Ours could be added to any vacccine to make it better," Martin said. "Our adjuvant is based on a botanical extract. Instead of harvesting, we have figured out how to manufacture that from scratch. GSK, in a malaria vaccine, and Pfizer, in Alzheimer's, both use the natural product. We intend to substitute ours for that. Then you have a reliable, stable supply of this instead of cutting down trees in Chile. Two companies, Agenus in New York, and CSL in Australia, harvest it from natural sources. It only grows in a certain region of Chile."
A Hebron native, Martin received his B.S. in chemistry from the University of Nebraska-Kearney and an M.D. from the University of Nebraska Medical Center. He completed his fellowship in pediatric infectious diseases and molecular microbiology at Washington University in St. Louis and worked in the biotechnolgy industry in the San Francisco Bay Area for 20 years.
Martin and his wife, Mary Kay, have four children and two grandchildren. He led the Influenza/MF59 team at Chiron, now Novartis Vaccines; the antiviral group at Parke-Davis; and the clinical gene and cell therapy group at SyStemix/GTI, a division of Novartis. He was the head of research and development at the gene therapy company Valentis, and then was the head of development at the gene therapy company Sangamo.
He then returned to Chiron, where he was head of the general medicines therapeutic unit. After Novartis acquired Chiron, he left to become the first employee in a monoclonal antibody startup company, Humabs. He then joined Dynavax as chief medical officer before being appointed president and a member of the board. He left Dynavax to start Great Plains Biotechnology.
"We are very pleased to have Tyler join our team, as he has a depth of drug development experience and corporate leadership to draw from, which will be key as we develop our company's infrastructure ahead of Phase 3 clinical trials for our inhaled insulin product," Patton said in a news release.
Martin said he could not pass up the prospect of making an important contribution to the treatment of diabetes.
Dance describes Dance 501 as a high-purity liquid formulation of recombinant human insulin stored in a dispenser for administration with a small handheld electronic inhaler. Dance said the electronic inhaler uses a patented vibrating mesh technology, designed to produce consistently sized particles of liquid insulin in the form of a smooth mist, allowing the efficient and consistent delivery of insulin into the lungs in a few comfortable breaths.
