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It’s All in the Genes
INNOVATOR OF THE YEAR
On the eve of an IPO, CuraGen hits its stride
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Business New Haven
1/26/1998
By: Lori Green
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If global-warming auguries turn out to be true, and droughts some day parch the amber fields of grain, will it be nothing but grapefruit in the morning? Or will bowls brimming with possibly even crunchier corn flakes still grace breakfast tables around the globe?
If the latter becomes the case, it will likely not be due to the CIA developing better food hoarding schemes for the future. Chances are good, however, that corn, a staple food for much of the world, will be preserved and upgraded by what's in those tiny test tubes neatly lined up in a white tray in a lab freezer up on the 11th floor of a Long Wharf office building.
Once home to a conventional insurance company, the building is now houses an incubator for unconventional corn seed genes - with a miserly thirst for water.
But we're not talking flakes here. CuraGen's key molecular biologists and chemical engineers are applying their own brand of visionary ingenuity and entrepreneurial verve to cure some of the most world's complex and intractable diseases. The company's focus is on creating new drug treatments for diseases that exact the highest tolls on human health and longevity: heart disease, stroke, cancer and hormonal disorders.
How they do it starts in the genes, and moves to inventing and refining technologies to identify all of the genes involved in a specific disease. Then CuraGen tracks and analyzes how the proteins produced by these genes conspire, via pathways, to produce destructive effects within the body.
Explains CuraGen's 35-year-old executive vice president and director, Gregory T. Went: “There are essentially two things you think about with regard to disease and biology: You think about inheritance, which are genes, and you think about the environment, right? Nurture vs. nature. These things work together.
“The way to develop new drug products,” Went continues, “is to characterize the problems in terms of genes, and then determine the connecting factors between the genes and chemicals, which is what happens at the level of proteins.”
Went, along with CEO, president and chairman Jonathan M. Rothberg, are leading CuraGen's cutting-edge advances on the frontier of genomics technologies.
Nurtured in infancy by the milk of government grants sourced from federal and state technology funds, CuraGen, propelled by its propriety technologies and process discoveries, successfully weaned itself over the past year to mutually beneficial private sector alliances with three major biotech players: Pioneer-Hi Bred, an agricultural manufacturer which controls more than 45 percent of the global corn seed market; Biogen, which has a breakthrough protein-based multiple sclerosis drug on the market; and Genentech, the first-born of the scrappy biotech innovators, with four protein-based drugs in use for treating an array of diseases related to insulin management and human growth hormonal disorders, including a drug that can help patients to grow new blood vessels.
CuraGen's native genius at the molecular level can be gleaned by scanning the accomplishments and training of its founders and directors. But the firm's secret cache of heavy artillery is its business acuity, vision, planning and, yes, the ability to act and seize the moment - a particularly critical talent for securing vital lab space.
Says Went: “By the end of 1996 we employed approximately 45 to 50 people exclusively in Branford. We were interested in leasing space here in Long Wharf to set up our corporate offices and assembly lines to deploy our process technologies. In anticipation, and in advance of signing our first corporate collaboration in 1997, we made the decision.
“This was the highest quality space we could find based on our growth plan,” says Went. “Chubb [insurance company] was ready to leave, and within eight weeks we were in. It's a great building to work in.”
The Long Wharf facility, with an open-floor plant design and enviable water views, houses 31,000 square feet. In addition, the company occupies an 8,000-square-foot technology development lab facility in Branford.
As soon as CuraGen moved in its assembly lines, equipment and people, the firm was ready to continue splicing genes and expanding its databases. Fast but precise execution of plans enabled the company to quickly set up the kind of operating structure that the COOs of many large, multinational companies only dream of: a cost-effective, maximum throughput, just-in-time model of delivering customized products and services to its customers.
No lab rats here. Strategic innovation is rampant. Particularly evident in CuraGen's streamlined, market-driven infrastructure that allows the company to get those gene fragment and protein information current databases uploaded pronto onto the Web, so others in the industry can subscribe and benefit from new discoveries.
One of the principal axioms of the scientific method is that a good study or outcome must be repeatable. CuraGen anticipates replicating its successes through further collaborative strategies that will generate future revenues, while government grant revenues are expected to decrease. The company recently filed an initial public offering with the SEC, which is still under registration.
Serial marriages with other biotech or pharmaceutical partners is not, however, the company's ultimate goal. Says Went: “Right now we have dedicated spaces and people for each project [customer]. We are using the simplest engineering method of production, which is the just-in-time model. However, the other 50 per cent of our capacity is for our own projects.”
As for the future? “We want to continue to collaborate, as well as do our own programs,” Went says. “Collaborations help to defray some operating expenses, but down the road the goal is to file introductory new drug applications on what emerges from that 50 percent that is ours.”
CuraGen has proven that a diverse array of jobs - not only those for high-tech Ph.Ds - can be created while biotech companies are still essentially in embryonic stages.
From a staff of 15 two years ago, the company's payroll has swelled to over 150. More than a dozen recent graduates have been recruited from Middlesex Community College's biotech program. The company is also encouraging local colleges to develop more biotech programs so that entry-level jobs can be filled as needed.
Says Went, a native Californian who imports Pete's coffee directly from the Bay Area to all of CuraGen's sites: “Look, in 1980 California had about 300 people working in biotech. Today there's between 60,000 to 70,000 at an average annual salary of $65,000 to $70,000.
“In Connecticut there are currently 400 people employed in biotech, but we have already exceeded our own growth projections for the industry.”
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