Hantavirus! Anthrax! SARS! Bioterror! Bird Flu! Swine Flu!
Dr. John Cheronis thinks he’s close to a cure for these headline-grabbing diseases.
He has been developing compounds for 26 years that may inhibit the enzymes that cause the deadly lung inflammation associated with these terrors.
Maybe your chest was crushed in a car accident. Or let’s say you were a soldier in Iraq and survived a roadside bomb only to begin inching your way into a body bag because of blast lung. A small-molecule drug, like the kind Cheronis wants to test, may be just the thing you need to keep breathing.
All Cheronis needs is about $30 million for clinical trials.
“I don’t enter into this industry with any illusions that I have the magic bullet,” he said. “I just think I’ve got a good shot at being able to make it work.”
Cheronis founded Accuthera LLC in Conifer, in 2006, as well as other biotech startups: Cortech Inc. in 1982 and Source Precision Medicine in 1999.
He knows biotech investing is an enormous risk, particularly with the diseases he targets.
“Some (say) sepsis and acute lung injury have killed more biotech companies than they have people,” Cheronis said.
Cheronis has degrees from Stanford and the University of Chicago. His company was a finalist at the Colorado BioScience Association’s BioWest Venture Showcase competition last year. He also has letters of support from impressive folks at the University of Colorado Health Science Center and a former U.S. Army brigadier general who now runs hospitals in Chicago.
What he doesn’t have is $30 million. And where’s he going to get it in a credit crunch?
Swine flu has a long way to go to earn the fear it has stirred in the media. The ordinary seasonal flu — which garners comparatively few headlines — kills more than 35,000 people a year in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Somehow that’s not scary.
Big pharmaceutical companies would rather sell erectile-dysfunction pills. Why blow $30 million on lung inflammation when you could make another TV commercial pandering to geriatric horndogs?
And venture capital? “There is no VC money at all. Period,” Cheronis said.
Hedge funds? Not them, either. And there’s no need to even mention the once-magic letters IPO.
Government? Cheronis said despite all the rhetoric about saving America from unthinkable biohazards, his funding requests are languishing.
He has turned to agencies established to develop medical countermeasures for chemical, biological and nuclear agents.
Americans used to be so much more fearful. In 2001, we had 9/11 and the anthrax attacks. Then came SARS and bird flu. Then came a couple years without biological threats. Then we got bored.
Maybe it’s time we really did freak out about swine flu.
Risk-averse capital markets are not funding the small biotech startups that usually find solutions. And the government is consumed with the viruses eating the banking system.
Cheronis hopes swine flu will finally bust the piggy bank.
“Either I get one of these contracts,” he said, “or I’m going to have to find another job.”
Al Lewis: 201-938-5266 or al.lewis@dowjones.com. Read Al’s blog at .
