Jan 15, 2004

Albuquerque Bio-Tech Firm Gets Millions

http://www.abqjournal.com/AED/133248outlook01-15-04.htm

The tests are expected to spare many breast cancer patients painful chemotherapy treatments and save some hepatitis patients a costly, yearlong course of medications with horrible side effects.
    Tullis-Dickerson & Co., vSpring Capital and Wasatch Venture Fund announced Wednesday that they had funded Exagen Diagnostics Inc.
    The company was organized in 2002 by a team of veteran Albuquerque entrepreneurs, led by Waneta Tuttle, who has been chief executive officer of three other local biotechnology start-ups.
    Tuttle, in an interview with the Journal, said Exagen forecasts that its revenues will reach $75 million in five years. It expects to ship its first commercial products in 2006.
    The company is a spinoff from Albuquerque's Quasar International, which makes products that test materials and parts nondestructively. That company, founded in 1992, is run by Jim Schwarz and Bob Nath.
    Exagen also announced that it has an agreement with the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center to cooperate on clinical studies and to allow Exagen to use genomic information collected by the university. Tuttle said the UNM relationship should shorten Exagen's product development schedule by five years.
    Exagen products will allow medical reference laboratories to perform highly accurate prognosis testing for breast cancer and hepatitis C patients.
    In the case of breast cancer, physicians currently evaluate the status of the patient's lymph nodes, the size of an excised tumor and other clinical information to predict how aggressively a cancer might grow. The inaccuracy of the approach means that many more patients are treated with chemotherapy than need to be, Tuttle said.
    Hepatitis C type 1 patients are typically given a yearlong course of medications that costs up to $30,000 and produce horrible side effects. Only about 40 percent of patients benefit from the treatment.
    Exagen technology will allow pathologists to determine whether a tumor is aggressive enough to warrant treatment and whether a hepatitis C type 1 patient is likely to benefit from current medications, Tuttle said.
    About 400,000 women are diagnosed with breast cancer in the developed world every year. Up to 4 million people in the United States have been infected with hepatitis C virus.
    The Exagen approach searches for from three to five genetic markers out of the entire genome and uses proprietary algorithms to determine whether the markers indicate aggressive cancer and treatable hepatitis.
    The approach is based on Quasar International's nondestructive testing technology.
    Quasar's product vibrates a part or material and measures the "resonant frequencies" the object produces. The process creates a huge number of data points that are collected in a computer database. Only a fraction of those data points indicates if a part is defective.
    To evaluate the part for the manufacturer that makes it, the database must be quickly mined and evaluated mathematically. Quasar researcher Cole Harris, now an Exagen vice president, developed especially fast and effective data-mining algorithms.
    Harris then began looking for other applications for the technology. Genetic studies seemed a natural fit, since every human cell contains about 30,000 genes and any disease state will be triggered by only a handful of them.
    After a year of research, Quasar asked Tuttle to help form Exagen to commercialize the technology.
    Exagen will spend roughly the next 18 months validating its breast cancer results and refining its techniques. It will license the technology to major laboratories for further validation this year, Tuttle said.