Stephen Roth was a half step away from retiring when reps from a two year-old Boston life sciences company approached him with their idea, and how they believed serotonin was a critical growth factor for lymphocytes. But in all his years as a professor of biochemistry at Johns Hopkins and successful CEO of a life sciences company he founded, Roth never heard that detail about serotonin and lymphocytes.
Roth felt so strongly about exploring it that he was able to move the company to Pennsylvania so he could become CEO of Immune Control, Inc.
“In those days, the concept of serotonin being required for immune system activation was broadly unheard of, but their data was convincing, and a lot of things made sense under that hypothesis,” says Roth, whose company develops novel, orally available, small molecules for autoimmune and inflammatory diseases and is working to commercialize the discovery that certain serotonin antagonists eliminate activated or dividing lymphocytes without disturbing resting ones. That ability can make or break treatment for blood cancers and organ transplant rejections, to name a few.
Practically all of the pharmaceutical chemistry testing on these compounds has been done in the central nervous system. Immune Control makes their own compounds, but can’t do it on the same scale as big pharma, so Roth is hoping he can pursue partnerships that would allow the company to access the thousands of drugs big pharma has developed but rejected because they’re outside the central nervous system.
Until that happens, virtually all of Immune Control’s time is spent on making new compounds designed to stay outside of the central nervous system.
Initially funded locally by Ben Franklin Technology Partners, Innovation Philadelphia, and the Lore angel investors group, Immune Control has four employees and outsources much of its research work to universities and clinical research organizations (like Penn and Drexel). In the last year, the company received bridge financing from existing investors totaling $6 million, and Roth says it’s working toward another large round of financing with a couple new investors sometime within the next 6-12 months.
Immune Control is involved in a nearly complete clinical trial involving psoriasis patients and is set to start a new trial on asthma patients. Roth is hoping to resume a clinical trial for blood cancer that was showing promising results before it could no longer afford to continue it.
“The beauty of our technology is you have a master switch that doesn’t effect the immune system per se, but that tiny portion of the immune system that is effected,” says Roth. “We’re trying to eliminate only the bad subset of the immune system. You can impact them surgically rather than blasting the whole thing.”
Source: Stephen Roth, Immune Control Inc.
Writer: Joe Petrucci