MARC S. REISCH, C&EN NORTHEAST NEWS BUREAU

It wasn’t that the biosciences were getting the cold shoulder in Phoenix during the genomics-driven biotech boom of the late 1990s. But in the absence of active support, the economic potential of most bioscience discoveries was not being exploited locally.

Bioscience stars were heading to the East Coast or West Coast where their ideas were funded and the new businesses they generated were coddled. Arizona’s political and academic leaders decided about three years ago that they wanted to change that. And though they will have to play catch-up, they’re making moves to turn the state, and particularly Phoenix, into a hotbed of new ideas to cure human disease.

When it comes to finding successful treatments for any number of different cancers, for instance, the opportunities are still wide open. “It is unlikely that any one research institution will be the winner,” says Jeffrey M. Trent, who was one of the leaders on the Human Genome Project at the National Institutes of Health. A geneticist with a Ph.D. from the University of Arizona, he moved from Maryland to Phoenix a year ago to turn lessons learned from genetic research into new medicines.

The M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Texas and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City are the 800-lb gorillas of cancer research, Trent acknowledges. “But there is still plenty of room for a boutique shop like us to succeed,” he says.

The “us” in this case is the Translational Genomics Institute, or TGen, in Phoenix, of which Trent is the president and scientific director, and the International Genomics Consortium—also in Phoenix—of which he is senior scientific adviser. With multi-million-dollar commitments from foundations, pharmaceutical and biotech firms, and state and local governments, these two institutes along with a third—Arizona State University’s Arizona Biodesign Institute—now being formed in the Phoenix area are hoping to plant the seeds of a life sciences boom.

To observers, it may seem late in the game to jump-start biotech research in the desert in the hopes that it would not only spawn academic research, but also new life sciences enterprises. It took decades for places like San Diego; Boston; Research Triangle Park, N.C.; and Maryland to build critical mass. But for Phoenicians, that doesn’t mean there’s no need to try.

Several life sciences firms have set down roots in the Sonoran Desert where Phoenix has risen on the site of an old Indian village. Start-up firm Ribomed, founded by an Arizona State graduate, developed a novel protein amplification system for making disease detection kits that does not rely on polymerase chain reaction or electrophoresis. Intrinsic Bioprobes, a 1997 spin-off from Arizona State, is “the only profitable proteomics company on the face of the planet,” claims founder Randy W. Nelson. Its mass spectrometric immunoassay technology makes possible high-throughput protein characterization.

Another local company founded in 1983, privately held Polymicro Technologies, makes more than 5 million meters a year of the silica capillary tubing used for gene sequencing and proteomics. Its specialty optical fibers are widely used in scientific analytical instruments.

SUN KISSED First phase of Arizona Biodesign Institute will cost $73 million and open in August 2004.
Courtesy of Arizona State

THE LOCAL CLIMATE proved attractive enough to convince Medicis, a dermatological and pediatric pharmaceuticals operation, to move from New York City eight years ago to Scottsdale, a suburb of Phoenix. The firm has $250 million in annual sales and more than 300 employees—up from 22 when it moved there. It does some development research work locally, but most research is contracted to out-of-state firms, says Joseph P. Cooper, executive vice president for corporate development.

Wet lab space is at a premium in Phoenix, which until recently had more readily accommodated aerospace and semiconductor manufacturing. Still, that didn’t stop the Flinn Foundation, a Phoenix-based nonprofit group, from commissioning a study from Battelle Institute on establishing the biosciences in Arizona. The December 2002 study found that Arizona would “have to play catch-up by focusing on technology platforms.”

Near-term opportunities are in neurological sciences and cancer therapeutics, the study noted. Long term, it suggested Arizona researchers could exploit opportunities in infectious diseases, agricultural biotech, and asthma-related therapeutics.

Political leaders and citizens are convinced that biotech has a future in the state. Voters recently approved Proposition 301—a state sales tax increase to raise $1 billion over 20 years for education in bioengineering, biotechnology, integrative medicine, diagnostics, and basic biological processes. At Arizona State’s campus just outside Phoenix in Tempe, work is under way on the Arizona Biodesign Institute, or AzBio—a multibuilding life sciences research center that will ultimately cost more than $340 million.

George Poste, former chief science and technology officer for drugmaker SmithKline Beecham, is a professor at Arizona State and in April became director of AzBio. The university has 47,359 students and is the fifth largest state university in the country, he says.

“But Arizona State was and still is not in the vanguard of leading research institutions like Duke, Stanford, and Harvard,” Poste says. AzBio, to be housed in four buildings with 750,000 sq ft of research space, is meant to change that. “We are unabashedly going after intellectual property that the university and its researchers can hold.”

AzBio will be connected by rail and computer links to TGen in downtown Phoenix. And TGen will have space in a 170,000-sq-ft, $46 million research complex along with the International Genomics Consortium.

IGC, a collaboration of more than 18 universities and medical research organizations, wants to build upon the Human Genome Project to describe the specific gene changes associated with diseases. Its databases will be publicly available and will build on tissue samples to be provided by institutions such as the Mayo Clinic, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and the University of Michigan Medical School.

All three initiatives in the greater Phoenix area will cover the bases from descriptive to applied biosciences. Officials say there will be space in the downtown research centers to nurture spin-off firms that they hope the flurry of scientific activity will gestate.

AzBio has already primed the pump for commercialization efforts at Arizona State. Early this year, a group of researchers from Motorola’s biochip business joined the faculty and now make up the Center for Applied NanoBioscience at AzBio, albeit in temporary space until the new building opens.

Motorola had sold its biochip business to Amersham, and the group was about to be disbanded. Instead, 14 researchers joined Arizona State and are working on projects such as flexible displays, DNA fingerprinting techniques, and ways to make biofuel cells by harnessing glucose cell metabolism, Director Frederic Zenhausern says.

The efforts in Phoenix are at the center of a larger state push to create and connect a corridor of academic life sciences research in the state, explains Richard Mallery, chairman of IGC. At the heart of that effort, says Mallery, a lawyer and deal maker with the law firm of Snell & Wilmer, was a personal tragedy. In 1999, his wife became ill with pancreatic cancer. He credits cancer researcher and drug developer Daniel D. Von Hoff, now executive vice president of TGen, with helping to extend her life for two years after the diagnosis.

	CONNECTIONS Polymicro Technologies produces specialty optical fibers widely used in analytical instruments. POLYMICRO TECHNOLOGIES PHOTO

MALLERY EXPLAINS that he asked Von Hoff what could be done to help not only his wife but other patients who were similarly ill. Von Hoff told him that the key to treating patients with cancer was to use genomics to learn how to target tumors. Von Hoff introduced Mallery to Trent, and they persuaded Trent to bring his genomics research efforts from NIH to Phoenix.

Together, the three developed a vision that starts with an effort to collect tissues that will allow researchers to profile the genetic foundation of disease. That is now the work of IGC. They decided that the collection effort ought to be followed by one that gets knowledge quickly to desperately ill patients. That is now the work of TGen and allied institutions such as the Arizona Cancer Center, with which Von Hoff is affiliated. Others had been working on a bioscience initiative for years, but the three articulated a plan that took advantage of efforts already under way through government and foundation work.

“It takes 14 years to take a newly discovered cancer treatment agent from discovery to approval,” Von Hoff says. “It is possible to do it in three years. That is what we are aiming for.” Genomics, he explains, allows researchers “to identify and enrich studies for populations likely to respond to a particular therapy.” Pharmaceuticals designed for selective populations would “leverage the response of individuals to benefit the greatest number of individuals.”

Richard Love, chief operating officer of TGen, says the group already has 130 employees, half of whom are scientists. It will ultimately have more than 300 employees and a budget of around $50 million a year. He says TGen will “take raw information and help us better understand the biology of disease.” As TGen gathers specific patient population tissue, he hopes to enable scientists to “better understand single-nucleotide polymorphism profiles and gene expression profiles.”

TGen won’t rush to design new drugs right away but intends to use genomics “to characterize disease and move to new rapid diagnosis techniques.” Ultimately, Love—who has started biotechnology companies such as Ilex Oncology with Von Hoff—hopes TGen work will also lead to drug discovery.

What IGC and its 36 employees will do is “focus on the collection of tissue and tissue characterization and will place its findings in the public domain,” Love says. TGen, on the other hand, “will look for unique patterns leading to new diagnostics and drugs.”

TGen will also have a number of projects that don’t necessarily involve IGC but that draw on knowledge gleaned from the Human Genome Project. For instance, the Southwest Autism Research & Resource Center and TGen just launched a genomics study that the partners hope will determine the underlying causes of autism.

Leaders of Phoenix’s upstart biosciences enterprises know they are embarking on a difficult journey when they talk about taking new discoveries from bench to bedside in three years. But despite competition from other, more established research centers, Phoenix leaders are betting they’ve assembled enough sizzle and cash to establish a biotech greenhouse in the desert.

Top