Printer-friendly format

ContourMed CEO Mimi San Pedro stands in the storage room of her Hillcrest company. ContourMed makes prosthetic breasts for cancer survivors.

When you think cutting edge biotechnology, the Hillcrest area of Little Rock doesn't leap to mind.

The green leafy neighborhood is home to several fine restaurants, and, with it being summer, one of the best snow cone operations in the land, but biotech? It seems like a head-scratcher.

But tucked away in the old Allied Telephone building — yes, Alltel really did have a home in Hillcrest once — is ContourMed, Inc., one of the 17 companies that have come into being from the BioVentures program at UAMS.

Mimi San Pedro runs ContourMed, which makes prosthetic breasts for cancer survivors. It is a labor of love for San Pedro, who herself is a breast cancer survivor. ContourMed became the first new BioVentures company in 1998.

The prosthetic process is customized from start to finish. A patient in need of a prosthesis will have done what San Pedro described as a "patented 3-D laser scanning technology." The prosthesis is then custom-fitted for each woman. The product is currently available in 41 states.

ContourMed is one of seven that BioVentures lists as "Graduate Companies," while the others are considered "Client Companies."

The graduate companies are, for the most, independent, while the client companies still work out of the BioVentures building on the UAMS campus.

The BioVentures mission from the beginning, according to Associate Director Jerry Damerow, has been twofold: to increase research and license patents.

The program has been successful on both counts. In the last 10 years research and sponsored program spending at UAMS has gone from $35 million a year to over $100 million a year, and the patent application has grown to the point that Damerow dreams of having a patent lawyer in-house to handle the demand.

A side benefit has been an economic boost, and the numbers are impressive: In the 2005 fiscal year alone, the impact to the state has been $315 million and some 310 new jobs have been created as a result.

BioVentures' successes have led other states to examine the program, but for Damerow it is one specific thing that has led to the success: "Part of that has been luck — we just have had some technologies pan out."

Damerow's dream for the program is "a large Arkansas cluster of medical and biotechnology businesses that create thousands of high wage jobs and positions the State to recruit similar companies to locate here and add to the cluster."

Not bad for a program that began more or less in the 1980s.

"I guess it was back in the mid-80s when Harry Ward (the former chancellor) and Dodd Wilson (the former dean of the medical school and current chancellor) decided to change their strategy and focus on research here," Damerow said. "They set a conscious strategy of increasing the research base here."

Damerow said it was that raw research which lead to the patents and that those are "the starting point for the startup companies."

Those companies now range from the Center for Toxicology and Environmental Health (CTEH) to BALM Innovations and InterveXion Therapeutics, with a host of others.

CTEH has 80 employees scattered over four states while BALM Innovations has no full-time employees and InterveXion reports only one.

CTEH describes itself as a company that provides "toxicology and environmental health consulting services." Business has been good, so good that the company had outgrown its current space and is moving into a new building in North Little Rock.

BALM may not have any full-time employees, but it does have a product, Omnibalm, a skin lotion that was developed by Bill Gurley, a doctor of pharmacy at UAMS. Gurley, who is a native of Jackson, Tenn., developed the product in his lab and originally had been handing out to his friends and family. Originally known as "Gurley's Goop," the lotion became the marketing project of UALR grad student Lydia Carson and it was she who developed a business plan as part of her MBA studies. Omnibalm can now be purchased in 29 USA Drug and Super D drugstores.

"We like those things like Dr. Gurley's that are closer to market," Damerow said. "It helps us balance out the high-risk things."

It is InterveXion, a pharmaceutical company, that gets Damerow excited and rightfully so.

"They, perhaps, could become the first major drug company in Arkansas," he said. "If they are successful, one of the things about having a drug company in your backyard is that you don't have to license that to the big guys and you could starting pulling some of that stuff into Arkansas. We would have our own big guy. Because of their unique circumstances with their technology, they have the opportunity to do that."

InterveXion is the brainchild of Michael Owens, PhD, and W. Brooks Gentry, MD. Owens, who has also getting some face time in a current UAMS television ad campaign, and Gentry have been working together on what is described as a treatment for PCP and meth addiction.

Meth addiction has no current treatment. Approvals are some years off. The PCP treatment won't be approved until 2009 and approval for the meth treatment will be after that.

The medicines are described as being able to remove the drug from the patient's brain.

Owens said, "these antibody medications should blunt or block the effects of drug use for three to four weeks after treatment."

Tags:

None

Do you know someone else who would like to see this?
Your Email:
Their Email:
Comment:	(Will be included with e-mail)
Secret Code	In the box below, enter the Secret Code exactly as it appears above *