Esperion Escapes the Pfizer Borg
Esperion Therapeutics, a biotech that Pfizer spent $1.3 billion acquiring in 2003, is free once more. And its founder, Roger Newton, is apparently putting the band back together.
Newton, in fact, has just pulled off one of the rarer and most complicated moves in biotechnology -- the spinout-startup-restart. That's when a major drugmaker or big biotech like Amgen acquires a biotech startup with a promising drug, then turns around and spins it out again, often with the same team in charge, but minus the drug or drugs of interest.
For Newton, it's been a long five years. The former Parke-Davis chemist was an early champion of a neglected anti-cholesterol drug that went on to become Lipitor, the world's best-selling medicine, after Pfizer acquired his company. He founded Esperion in 1998 specifically to search out new cholesterol treatments, and by the time Pfizer came knocking, Esperion held a potential winner -- a drug it called ETC-216, a synthetic form of HDL, the "good" cholesterol that helps clear away the fatty gunk that otherwise collects in arteries and puts people at risk of heart attacks. (Forbes hailed ETC-216 as "artery Drano" back in 2003.)
Pfizer, however, moved with something less than alacrity once it swallowed Esperion. Three years later, it told analysts that the drug was ready to begin mid-stage, phase II trials -- one of which, in fact, Esperion had completed prior to the acquisition. News on ETC-216 has been scarce ever since; the most recent mention I could find was a passing reference in a Heartwire article from early 2007 that mostly focused on the failure of a different Pfizer cholesterol drug. (UPDATE: Forbes now says Pfizer discontinued all the drugs Esperion discovered because of "manufacturing and other difficulties.)
Newton, meanwhile, has apparently been planning Esperion's rebirth for some time. He stuck around in Ann Arbor, Mich. -- Esperion's one-time home -- when Pfizer closed its facility there in early 2007 and laid off 2,100 employees. (That restructuring basically swept away the last traces of Esperion within Pfizer.) Early last year, Newton told the local chamber of commerce that he planned to start another company using intellectual property licensed from Pfizer. Earlier this month, the Ann Arbor Business Times reported that Newton was looking into renting the same facility Esperion had previously used.
As part of the spinout, Esperion has just raised $22.8 million in venture capital. Newton will run the resurrected company, which is still part-owned by Pfizer. As a sort of going-away present, Esperion retains one of its former drugs -- an unidentified small-molecule inhibitor of fatty-acid and cholesterol synthesis that appears to be ESP 31015, at least going by this old Esperion press release. The drug should be in human tests by now as well, although once again, news appears to be kind of scarce.
Whatever else you might think about this spinout, it doesn't exactly represent a huge vote of confidence in Pfizer's drug-development capabilities. At least Pfizer seems to realize its shortcomings in that regard, as it presumably has the right to take back control of ESP 31015 (or whatever) whenever it wants. Or, of course, it could just re-acquire Esperion at some point down the road, and start the whole cycle over again.
Postscript: Spinout-startup-restarts have been growing more common recently, although they usually take place on a more compressed timescale than Esperion's five-year hiatus -- and frequently involve halfway-clever renamings as well. Last October, for instance, Amgen disgorged Relypsa, a reborn version of the biotech Ilypsa that Amgen had acquired four months earlier.
Other examples include Sequel Pharmaceuticals, launched as a restart of NovaCardia after its acquisition by Merck, and Cerexa Pharmaceuticals, a second-generation version of Peninsula Pharmaceuticals. It's as if some of Cisco's "catch and release" acquisition lessons have started to rub off on the drug industry.
Image at top from Flickr user Francois Schnell, CC 2.0
