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What's New 'A Serial Entrepreneur'
Abe Abuchowski, a pioneer in New Jersey's biotechnology industry, has a sober, smart business plan for his latest venture, Prolong Pharmaceuticals. The biochemist helped develop a drug delivery technology, called pegylation, that makes existing medicines more effective and played a key role in the founding of Enzon Pharmaceuticals a quarter-century ago. Now, he plans to make second-generation versions of so-called PEG drugs in overseas markets and bring them back to the United States, where he can bootstrap cost savings to beat back rivals. Abuchowski spent a week in China this summer trying to line up partners for the private Monmouth Junction biotech, and he already has locked up an alliance with the Indian drugmaker Zydus Cadila. On a back burner, however, Prolong is cooking up something wilder and woollier: the development of an oxygenated blood product that could be used to treat strokes, diabetes complications or even battlefield wounds. Abuchowski contemplates a huge undertaking involving thousands of dairy cows, which would be bled every three weeks to provide a steady supply of hemoglobin, the oxygen-shipping protein in red blood cells. He has tested monitoring software, tied to radio tag tracking devices for each cow, on herds in Florida. He's scouted out prime land in Wyoming. And he's come up with a detailed system to treat each cow as a mini-pharmaceutical plant so the entire enterprise can pass stiff Food and Drug Administration regulations. "These would be the best cared-for animals on earth," he beams. The blood substitute -- which uses PEG technology to stabilize the hemoglobin -- can theoretically send a burst of oxygen around a blood clot more efficiently than whole blood when someone is suffering a stroke. It also could help with traumatic blood loss. In an animal test, a large pig was bled out and resuscitated with a single unit of the PEG-hemoglobin, company officials say. And unlike whole blood, the oxygenated product can be stored at room temperature or higher for a month. Still, Wall Street's enthusiasm for blood substitutes has dimmed after a series of failed experiments. There's a market for such a product, but not a lot of upfront money to fund it, said Ian Sanderson of Cowen & Co. "Any sort of blood substitute program is viewed by most investors as extremely high-risk," he said. For now, Abuchowski is concentrating on more low-hanging fruit. The Zydus Cadila partnership is designed to yield a PEG version of erythropoietins, the class of anemia drugs that includes Amgen's Epogen and Johnson & Johnson's Procrit. He's trying to strike a similar licensing deal in China, but wants to find the right fit in a partner. "Plenty of companies there are not up to snuff," he said. "The ones we are the most interested in are building new facilities to FDA standards." Abuchowski said he is negotiating with two companies in China. If the timetable works out, some of his products could be sold in overseas markets in a few years, and a new drug filing could be made in the United States in four or five years. A jack-of-all-trades who has mastered woodworking, flying a turboprop plane and the painstaking restoration of a 1970 Mercedes Benz 280 SL convertible, Abuchowski began conducting PEG research in the 1970s as a graduate student under Rutgers biochemistry professor Frank Davis. The two men founded Enzon Pharmaceuticals in 1983, and Abuchowski ran the company until 1996. The company introduced two products during that time: Adagen, a cure for the rare "bubble boy" syndrome and the first commercial PEG product, and the cancer drug Oncaspar. Enzon's pegylation technology also is used in Schering-Plough's hepatitis C drug PegIntron and other therapies. After Abuchowski left Enzon a dozen years ago, he became a stay-at-home dad in Hunterdon County who dabbled in consulting. But he still itched to start a new business. "He's a serial entrepreneur," said Debbie Hart, president of BioNJ, the state's trade group for biotechnology companies and an organization Abuchowski helped get off the ground. Founded in 2002, Prolong competes with Nektar Therapeutics and Enzon. It has just six employees; Abuchowski has deliberately kept it lean, since most of its operations will be outsourced. Biotech survival rates are abysmal, and Abuchowski already has bucked the odds by building a successful company with Enzon. But he said he likes his odds with Prolong. "Prolong has a far greater chance at success than Enzon ever did, simply because of experience," he said, adding the only business knowledge he had back in 1983 was from a college stint as a McDonald's manager. Bigger companies have the scientific know-how to create PEG drugs. But Abuchowski said it also requires art, and no one knows the technology better than he does. "It sounds simple," he said. "But it's not simple." |