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The Science Guy
Bayer's Sweetnam talks about big things planned for
his company in West Haven
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Business New Haven
10/30/2000
By: BNH
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Paul M. Sweetnam of Cheshire is vice president of the Institute for Research Technologies for Bayer Corp.'s North American Pharmaceutical Division, which October 17 unveiled a new $7 million High Technology Center in West Haven. Sweetnam previous was a manager/senior research investigator for Pfizer Central Research in Groton and as scientific director for NovaScreen in Baltimore. He holds a doctorate in neurochemistry from Georgetown and a postdoctoral fellowship in pharmacology/psychiatry from the Yale School of Medicine.
What drove the need for a new High Technology Center at Bayer?
The facility was driven by recent advances in the sequencing of the human genome, which was done by Celera. Bayer needed a facility that was capable of handling the large amount of data that was being inputted in the human genome-sequencing databases.
Can you elaborate on the kinds of research to be performed at this new facility?
The facility has a number of different disciplines. One discipline is what we call our high-throughput DNA sequencing facility. That allows us to go in and look at diseased tissue and normal tissue and sequence DNA. Where the human genome work was done just sequencing normal [cells] across the line, what we're trying to do now is look for what genes are expressed in what diseased tissues and which are not. So we're looking for disease-specific genes. Next, you need to turn that into the building blocks for the cell, which are the proteins. So there's a protein analytical group in this facility, and their job is to characterize the proteins that the molecular biologists clone out of the human genome. Once we know we have the right protein, the next function in this building is an assay-development group. They turn that protein into an assay. A biological assay typically consists of two pieces of a biological puzzle that come together. This group takes those two pieces, puts them together and has some functional readout. So now we have what we call a lock-and-key biological assay. So then the next group is high-throughput screening. This group takes these lock-and-keys and screens Bayer's entire file against it to see if they can find a surrogate key - a small molecule, a chemical that Bayer has synthesized that will mimic or block the key in that lock. And that's the starting point in drug-discovery.
Is this kind of research new to Bayer?
The facility is new, but the scientists have been at Bayer now, many of them, for almost ten years. And the techniques are not new. We've upgraded some of the equipment, because the equipment changes every six months, and we've also put in a new facility dedicated to looking at the information. So what's new is the amount of information that's come out. This building was designed in many ways to handle that vast amount of information. So the techniques really aren't new; it's the information that's new, and how we have gone across disciplines to deal with it.
Your research is focused on three disorders: cancer, diabetes and depression. Why those three in particular?
That was a business decision made by Bayer AG [of Leverkusen, Germany]. Bayer AG actually has research facilities in Japan, Germany and England. Each of these facilities has targeted a particular therapeutic area. Germany is very strong in cardiovascular and anti-infectives. In the U.S. we tend to focus on cancer and these metabolic diseases - diabetes and obesity. Bayer has split its research into core competencies. In Japan, their core competency is in asthma.
How is Bayer AG actually organized - not as research entities, but as a corporation? And what part of that, exactly, is in West Haven and Orange?
The North American head of pharmaceutical research, Wolfgang Plischke, is housed in West Haven, so that where the corporate offices are. Dr. Plischke oversees not only what we call the small-molecule research facility, which is in West Haven also. He also heads the biological division in North Carolina. That's plasma products. We have a biotech division in Berkeley, and they're working on protein therapeutics. So there are three research divisions in the U.S., all under the [direction of] North American Pharmaceutical [in West Haven].
Where do these compounds that you test actually come from?
Bayer AG, as are many pharmaceutical companies, like Pfizer, started out as a chemical company. They were making specialty chemicals. Over the course of 100 years Bayer made chemicals in a number of different divisions - the agricultural division and other divisions - and they stockpiled those. Back in about 1980, we realized that we had hundreds of thousands of chemicals just sitting here, and wouldn't it be interesting if you could test those to see if any had value as potential therapeutics? That became high-throughput screening. We also have an active program of going out and looking at external purchases from academic chemists, from specialty chemical companies that collected compounds from eastern Europe over the course of time since the fall of the [Berlin] wall, so we have access to chemicals that the Russians had made for years. We also have rational means [through which] our chemists now design and make compounds at a very rapid and efficient rate through something known as high-speed analoging.
Is this pharmacology? Is it biotechnology? What's the difference?
Biotechnology is a tough thing to define. Biotechnology companies run the gamut. When you come to the pharmaceutical industry - Bayer in particular - you're looking at a small-molecule, traditional drug approach - making aspirin and things like that. Biotechnology focuses not on chemistry, but on molecular biology, and so forth, to look at the actual proteins in the body to see if they can turn those proteins into drugs.
With the exception of announcing major new facilities like these, Bayer keeps a pretty low public profile around here. Is that by design, or simply a question of keeping the focus on science?
I'm a scientist, so I would say the focus in West Haven, at least, is on drug discovery. We were the drug-discovery outfit in West Haven, Conn., ten years ago. We were a small biotech. Only about seven or eight years ago did they decide to bring in small-molecule drugs and to start to actually build their pipeline. So I think the real focus here over the past eight to ten years has been to strengthen their pipeline and set up a drug-discovery facility in the U.S. I'm sure in the future there are plans to be market-driven. But I think Bayer wanted to get a foothold, to get the research started, and to get the pipeline filled.
So, when are we going to be curing cancer?
[Laughs] Cancer is such a multi-factorial disease. One of the big steps, I think, was actually mapping the human genome. But it's going to take years to understand that. We have, I think, at least four compounds which have gone into the clinic in the past two years, and there are therapeutics coming out. Whether they are 'cures' or not [is difficult to say]. There are xytotoxic cures, which we have not focused on, [which seek] stasis, where you just try to hold the cancer in remission. 'Cure' is a word I don't want to use. But I would say we are still - even with all the hype about the sequencing of the human genome - probably ten to 15 years away from having a really strong understanding [of cancer].
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