Intrinsic DRIVE

Lorus’s Jim A. Wright, PhD has translated his passion for research into tangible therapeutic and corporate results

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By Deborah Komlos

Cancer drug company Lorus Therapeutics Inc. (Toronto, ON) took a strong swerve in its corporate course when Jim A. Wright, PhD came on board.

In 1999, Wright was president of Winnipeg, Man.-based GeneSense Technologies Inc. — a firm he co-founded with Dr. Aiping H. Young, PhD in 1996 — when it merged with Lorus. The move was looked upon as an ideal match, Wright says.

“Lorus Therapeutics, at the time we did the merger, was having difficulty raising financing. It looked as though if the two companies got together, we would diversify our platform technologies and would have an attractive company for raising new money,” says Wright, Lorus’s president and CEO.

The merger would also provide some liquidity to GeneSense shareholders, he says, as it was a private firm and Lorus was already a public company trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

A wholly owned subsidiary of Lorus, GeneSense is now part of the Lorus team, in what Wright describes as a “self-contained unit” that includes research, preclinical, clinical and business activities all in one place. Currently, Lorus is also trading on the American Stock Exchange.

Focused on developing low-toxicity, efficacious cancer therapies with multiple platform technologies, Lorus has a pipeline comprising eight Phase II clinical trials and a Phase III registration clinical trial of its lead drug Virulizin®, an immunotherapeutic for the treatment of pancreatic cancer. Approved in Mexico for the treatment of malignant melanoma, the drug has been awarded Orphan Drug Status, Fast Track Status and a Special Protocol Assessment from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Data from the Phase III trial will be analysed over the summer, with an aim to submit a New Drug Application to the FDA in early 2006, Wright says.

Driving Forces
A much different turn of events would have likely ensued at Lorus had Wright not made his transition into the corporate realm, a shift that the former professor and scientist says was both a huge leap and a major risk.

Among his past affiliations while in Manitoba, Wright was a professor of microbiology at the University of Manitoba (Winnipeg, MB) and a Terry Fox senior scientist with the National Cancer Institute of Canada (Toronto, ON).

Wright says his move meant leaving behind a successful career, as well as a city in which he had many friends and family. But the reasons for change couldn’t have been more clear-cut.

“I had a large lab . . . perhaps one of the best funded cancer-research laboratories in Canada,” Wright recalls. “I believe, and others have said so, we had a strong international reputation. I got to the point where we had done a great deal of science, published lots of papers, and I wanted to do a transition of that technology into something that was practical for cancer patients.”

One of the ways of effecting change, Wright says, was to form a biotech firm around the innovative technologies being developed from the basic research — including the antisense products GTI-2040 and GTI-2501, now part of Lorus’s pipeline.

For Wright, it was a personal decision to get GeneSense going: the firm’s first financing came from the sale of his much-beloved sailboat.

“To this day, my wife and I talk about that because it was a bit of a sacrifice,” Wright says. “So we used the money from that to get the company started, then we raised $5.6 million from an investor group in Toronto. And then it occurred to us to refinance the company beyond that, Toronto was the place to be.

“We merged the company with Lorus and continued to develop those technologies, as well as advancing very aggressively the lead product that was in Lorus at the time, which was Virulizin . . . Over the years, I’ve raised, with others, well over $100 million for this company. It’s been a successful approach to developing the technologies.”

Critical Options
Wright emphasizes the importance of developing alternatives to current cancer therapeutics.

Most cancer patients presently receive drugs that are cytotoxic and have many side-effects, he says. It’s also important to recognize that one drug will not be able to cure all of the many forms of cancer, he adds.

Illustrating the urgency of finding improved treatments, Wright says that the average pancreatic cancer patient would live perhaps as long as six months after detecting their disease, even if they are being treated with gemcitabine, the only drug approved to treat that illness.

“In order to treat patients realistically into the future,” Wright says, “we’re going to have to have drugs that will allow them to be treated on an ongoing basis during their life . . . (and) certainly increase their lifespan significantly — provide safe drugs for these people as well as medicine-friendly drugs, and if we do that effectively, then people can have a high quality of life and continue to function normally during their day.”

With Virulizin, Lorus has shown favourable safety and efficacy results in Phase I and II clinical trials.

By stimulating a patient’s innate immunity, Virulizin is “kick-starting a process that activates macrophages, (and) natural killer cells,” Wright explains. “Natural killer cells in turn activate more macrophages and together they release components that are naturally in your body that have anticancer activity, and they are attracted to the tumour where they essentially destroy it.”

GTI-2040, another of the firm’s promising anticancer candidates, is an antisense drug that specifically targets a component of an enzyme that is needed for DNA synthesis and cell proliferation. Lorus recently announced successful completion of a Phase II kidney cancer trial of the drug, and is also working with the U.S. National Cancer Institute, testing it in six different cancer trials under a Phase II development program.

The Right Stuff
As with any change in career path, there were perhaps some bumps along the way, but Wright says there is nothing he would have done differently.

A difficulty he mentions, however, is the challenge facing academics trying to transition their laboratory work into a clinical product.

“You could approach a biotech company or perhaps you could approach big pharma, and ask them to help you develop it,” Wright says. “But the success rate is very small if you do it that way. First of all, they may not have the passion or vision you have. Secondly, if they did take it, you would lose control of its development. And thirdly, it’s very difficult to encourage them to go ahead and develop your technology.”

Another way — and perhaps a more difficult one — Wright says, was the course he chose: fund the firm yourself, and then, with encouraging data in hand, approach investors to gain support for your startup.

In addition to having the right strategy, Wright highlights several traits essential to making the shift to business.

“You have to be a leader because you have to rally others to your cause, and be a good communicator,” he says. “You have to have good ethical standards because what you’re doing should be correct and you have to deal correctly with people.”

Other characteristics topping his list are being innovative, staying open-minded while learning new areas, and basics such as having a strong work ethic and problem-solving skills.

Wright points out that none of these attributes are profession-specific. The only difference between areas, he says, is semantic.

“In science there’s a language and in business there’s a language, and if you put your mind to learning that language, then really the same process is followed in both cases,” he explains.

Also critical, Wright continues, is surrounding oneself with good people who can give good advice, while keeping in tune with one’s vision.

“You know what the vision is better than anybody, and you understand what the technology is like and how to develop things further,” he says. “It’s very important to stay the course, be true to yourself and to use those talents you’ve had in other areas (in which) you’ve developed careers, in the career that you develop in business.”

Reflecting on his own experience, Wright says the pathway from academia into biotech has been very exciting and interesting, and has had its own challenges — just as it would have been challenging in his former academic environment. And it’s a pathway that he says he wouldn’t have envisioned early on when he co-founded GeneSense Technologies.

He encourages those looking to start a biotech career not to be intimidated, to believe in the possibility of success and to maintain a strong sense of where they want to go.

“I think sometimes people do have the perception that if you’ve come from a different area, then perhaps you can’t succeed in a different area — science versus business,” Wright says. “I never had that vision. I always thought . . . that you could do them both if you were passionate and interested.

“If you’re not interested, don’t bother. But if you are, then I think the same talents and skills are required in both areas: you just go and do it.”