Spend 10 or 15 minutes with just about anyone working within the confines of the life sciences or biotech industries in Southeastern Pennsylvania today, and there is one solitary fact that you will nearly be guaranteed to learn. That fact--and we mention this, by the way, only for the increasingly slim number of you who aren’t aware of it already--is that the Greater Philadelphia Region is now home to the second highest concentration of bioscience companies in the entire country. For the record, Boston remains in the lead, with the San Francisco Bay Area ranking in third place.

That seemingly small bit of information may well come as a surprising bit of unexpected good news, especially to anyone whose knowledge of regional life sciences begins and ends at Big Pharma. After all, Greater Philly has long played host to an impressive roster of some of the biggest names in the industry, including Glaxo Smith Kline, Merck, and Wyeth.

But regardless of the multitudes of pharmaceutical companies who have long done business in the area, it’s an indisputable fact that the current economic climate has not been particularly kind to Big Pharma. Layoffs at GSK, for instance, were so numerous during the first quarter of 2010 that their sheer numbers made headlines alone. And yet those job losses were a mere pittance when compared to the cuts at Merck & Co., the second-largest drug maker in the U.S., which announced a mind-boggling 16,000 layoffs after its recent merger with Schering-Plough.

And yet as economically devastating as those figures may first appear, anyone with even the slightest inkling of an entrepreneurial sensibility can see the potential silver lining. It begins, of course, with a hungry hoard of unemployed science PhDs who have just gained an incredibly valuable amount of real-world work experience on someone else’s dime. And throughout Southeastern Pennsylvania, it has lately been ending with an unprecedented number of biotech and life science startups.

What are these uniquely ambitious and brilliant minds attempting to accomplish? To a large degree, the very same objectives they were     tasked with solving in their previous lives. They’re finding new uses for old drugs. They’re discovering unusual ways to fix devastating diseases. And on the whole, they’re also working longer hours with leaner crews and tighter budgets. Keystone Edge recently had an opportunity to speak with two of the Philadelphia area’s most celebrated entrepreneurial scientists. Here are their stories.   

Andrew Reaume, Co-Founder & CEO of Melior Discovery

You might say that Dr. Andrew Reaume’s science story has finally come full circle. After earning a PhD in genetics at the University of Connecticut, he began his career by spending seven years as a research scientist at Cephalon. This was “back in a day when Cephalon was a much smaller company,” Reaume says. “A true biotech in the classic sense of the word.”

Eventually, Reaume landed a position at the Connecticut-based research lab of Pfizer Inc., where he worked in the Genomics Department. It was a classic ladder-climbing career move. Although to hear Reaume himself tell the story, it was also life-changing in a slightly different sense. “The way I've often told the story,” he says, “is that there's no better prescription for psychosis than taking someone who's got an entrepreneurial fire in their belly, and putting them in one of the world's biggest bureaucracies.”

Entrepreneurial fire or not, however, Reaume choose to stay on at Pfizer, where he eventually managed to work out a sort of Faustian bargain with himself. The deal was simple enough in theory: Reaume had somehow convinced his superiors at Pfizer to put him through the Wharton School’s MBA program at the University of Pennsylvania, which was nearly a 500 mile round-trip from the company’s Connecticut lab.

“I certainly worked very hard to give back (to Pfizer) after (graduating from Wharton),” Reaume insists. But during his time at UPenn, Reaume developed relationships with a number of mentors who encouraged him to pursue an entrepreneurial path. It was roughly 18 months after receiving his MBA that Reaume decided to follow that advice.

“Capturing the untapped value of therapeutics” was the slogan given to the company he eventually launched, Melior Discovery, with a former Cephalon colleague. As its name suggests, Melior is the sort of organization generally known in the pharmaceutical industry as a discovery company. To put it simply, Melior works to discover unique and novel uses for drugs that originally failed to find a place in the open market. There is big money, of course, to be made in the pharmaceutical discovery business, especially from huge corporations who’ve already invested in clinical drug trials that ultimately went nowhere. Companies, in other words, much like Pfizer. Which, perhaps not surprisingly, became Melior’s second official partnership, just months after the company was founded.   

“I think it’s surprising that (the Philadelphia region) isn’t number one,” says Reaume when asked about the area’s runner-up ranking on the list of the country’s most important bioscience hubs. “Clearly the Philadelphia area is the Mecca to pharmaceutical companies. The region has a rich history in pharmaceutical R&D, so in the 1980s and 90s, as biotechs emerged, they naturally grew up next to their pharmaceutical brethren. This is where the concentration is, and it's been that way for the better part of a century, to be sure.”

Daniel M. Skovronsky, Founder and CEO of Avid Radiophamaceuticals

For Dr. Daniel Skovronsky, however, who held a comfortably reliable academia job at the University of Pennsylvania prior to starting his company in 2005, going the entrepreneurial route wasn’t necessarily about quenching a proverbial fire in the belly. “I was driven to entrepreneurship out of a desire to see a particular technology be made widely available," says Skovronsky, who was a scientific director at the school's Center for Neurodegenerative Disease Research. "So it wasn't about economics, or about a desire to build a company. It was really about, 'Here's this neat technology--this cool technology that can have an impact on millions of people's lives--and somebody's got to do it.' And I felt that if I didn't do it, the technology would never get developed.”

And what exactly was that technology? To put it plainly, Skovronsky’s company uses a unique sort of molecular imaging as a way to noninvasively detect diseases before they actually develop. In the case of Alzheimer’s disease, for instance, it’s entirely possible that Avid’s technology may soon be able to detect it in living patients. (With current science, Alzheimer’s can only be definitively diagnosed after death.) And there’s even more potential good news: Avid is currently involved in trials and clinical studies involving both Parkinson’s disease and diabetes, both of which may someday be detectable by Avid’s technology as well.   

One of the most truly unique aspects of Skovronsky’s decision to become an entrepreneur, however, was its inherent altruism. That is, unlike those starting a company after being laid off, Skovronsky sacrificed a potentially promising career at UPenn when he chose to pursue his research independently, and to launch Avid. “I didn't have any guarantees that my job (at UPenn) would be waiting for me (if Avid failed),” he admits. “And it's hard to go back to academia after you've left.”

According to Skovronsky’s own version of the story, however, he was simply giving himself one year to see if his idea would actually take off. To that end, he wrote down a total of three goals for his first year in business: Get money. Get an experienced team together. And find a corporate partner. “And we did those three things,” he says.

And although Avid’s technology hasn’t yet managed to wipe the worry caused by Alzheimer’s disease from the families of the estimated five million Americans in whom it has been diagnosed, it certainly has made phenomenally rapid advances during its relatively short life as a business. Skovronsky, for instance, was named an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year in 2009. And even more promising is the fact that Avid has closed such an incredibly large amount of financing in the past few years--including just over $34 million in 2009 alone.

“It's hard to find an individual who doesn’t have a connection to (Alzheimer’s),” says Skovronsky. “This is just a disease that touches nearly everybody in America. And to be able to do something for this disease? It's a phenomenal opportunity. And I think that, ultimately, was the motivator.”
   
Of course, Drs. Reaume and Skovronsky are by no means the only regional bioscience entrepreneurs with inspirational stories to tell. Keep your eyes on Keystone Edge in the coming weeks and months, as we plan to share more stories of Pennsylvania’s evolving biotech sector.

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Dan Eldridge is a small business and entrepreneurship journalist based in Philadelphia. He is the author of Moon Handbooks Pittsburgh (Avalon Travel), and the co-author of Lonely Planet guides to Turkey, Thailand and New England. He blogs at laborparty.wordpress.com. 

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Photos:

Avid Radiopharmaceuticals founder and CEO Daniel M. Skovronsky at his office and research facility in Philadelphia

Skovronsky at work in the lab

Melior Discovery co-founder and  CEO Andrew Reaume in a research monitoring room at company headquarters in Exton.

Skovronsky

All Photographs by Jeff Fusco