M
AY
2005
BioExeutive International
31
task you can imagine," he says. "You
need so many specialties: regulatory
affairs, preclinical studies, animal
efficacy studies, toxicology studies,
pharmacology, and so on. All these
people who know all these different
things, and no one individual is an
expert in all of them. So you have to
force them to sit down at a table and
talk to each other."
The necessity of such collabora-
tion becomes even more acute in the
situation that PTC has placed itself--
combining two almost opposing
scientific disciplines, chemistry and
biology, as equal partners in the enter-
prise. In that case, small scale becomes
even more advantageous.
"We built everything internally,"
says Peltz. "In addition to biology, we
built chemistry with high-throughput
screening. We built our own library
with 200,000 compounds, then phar-
macology, toxicology, and clinical
development. Then we just turned the
crank using our technology to do mul-
tiple screens a year. Then we pooled our
programs that looked promising, and
as those programs advanced, we then
focused on only a couple of programs
in any given year with heavy resources
for lead optimization. That laser-light
focus let us really move ahead."
Besides building its internal opera-
tions, PTC also makes use of external
contractors for R&D, manufacturing,
Chief Operating Officer: After Pfizer
announced it was buying his company,
Pharmacia's William Ju, then vice presi-
dent and project leader of oncology R&D,
chose to forego opportunities at the
larger company. Instead, like many other
Pharmacia executives, Ju sought out a
more entrepreneurial environment. He
found it at PTC Therapeutics (as did his
colleague, Langdon Miller, MD) in 2003.
Formerly, after earning his MD at the
University of Pennsylvania and doing basic
research at the National Cancer Institute,
Ju joined industry first at Hoffmann-La
Roche, then headed various research
units at Merck. His R&D leadership roles
pressed him not only into scientific man-
agement, but also strategic planning and
implementation in a business context. His
specialty was "the interface between dis-
covery and phase I trial and proof of con-
cept," he says. He explains what brought
him from big pharma to PTC Therapeutics:
"I just thought PTC was a remarkable
company with remarkable people, and
the story that you've heard thus far. It has
a novel platform that is at the cutting
edge of science, but one close enough
to where products could actually result
from it. Having done a little bit of due
diligence, I knew the science was cutting
edge, with Stu [Peltz] and Allan Jacobson
being leaders in the field, that Stu had
recruited a team that was actually able
to advance this concept very far along
in preclinical studies. Even at Merck and
big pharma, there's a certain criteria that
you establish before you bring things to
the clinic and I was, frankly astounded by
what a really high quality job had been
done here to translate Stu's vision into
products that were about to go into the
preclinical and pre-IND stage--and then
in a short period of time, into the clinic.
Good science had really been translated
into excellent drug development and
discovery. The technology has promised
to treat serious diseases and those that
have been previously intractable to other
types of traditional methodologies. And
finally, it combined the best of the new
and the old, so we had this new idea that
the company was based on traditional
chemistry, biology and traditional drug
delivery with the oral compounds."
B
IOGRAPHY
: W
ILLIAM
J
U
, MD
Vice President, Finance and Strategic
Planning: With an MBA in Finance from
The Wharton Business School, William
"Chip" Baird went to work at First Union
Bank "underwriting debt facilities to
middle-market and large corporate bor-
rowers." He then joined LEK Consulting,
where he provided life science com-
panies with strategic and financial
advice. Baird came to PTC Therapeutics
in 2002 to help with its successful $50
million Series E funding round. He
stayed to direct its strategic planning
and financial areas such as accounting,
budgeting and forecasting, financial
systems and controls, and treasury.
What was it that hooked him on PTC?
"As a consultant from the outside, I had
seen a lot of companies that were put
together well in terms of management
teams and others, not so well. But it
was clear that here was a vision of put-
ting together the right kind of team.
One key element was hiring before the
need was readily apparent, so we got
a clinical team in place even before we
filed our first IND. That kind of forward
thinking is important. Also hiring people
with significant functional expertise but
that have the skill sets to communicate
across the different disciplines. Different
people speak very different languages.
As a team, it says a lot that all those
people can come to the table and still
have a conversation in a common lan-
guage, make decisions, and move for-
ward. It's part of what makes this group
unique and a lot of fun to work with."
B
IOGRAPHY
: W
ILLIAM
B
AIRD
