Gwyneth K. Shaw Photo
Anil R. Diwan, president of NanoViricides, in his West Haven office.
The warehouse hard by the railroad tracks isn’t the stereotypical headquarters for a cutting-edge company hatching big-time breakthrough medicines. There’s no fancy logo sign, no sweeping glass-and-metal entrance area, no headset-wearing assistants.
But this biomedical outfit has millions in the bank. It’s just spending wisely as it develops the Venus Flytrap of antiviral drugs.
The company, NanoViricides, Inc., raised $10 million last year, including a December infusion of $2.5 million. Its quest: develop a biodegradable setup based on polymers that takes advantage of the way viruses succeed, by binding to a healthy cell. The treatment poses as a regular cell, then wraps up the viral particle.
By breaking up the virus, and preventing it from successfully binding to healthy cells, the therapy stops the disease in its tracks, just like a Venus Flytrap ensares a bug.
“When the virus binds, it opens up and grabs it,” said founder Anil R. Diwan, who began developing the his idea at New Haven’s Science Park and moved it to West Haven to save money on overhead.
Diwan and his 10-person staff made a point of pinching pennies on costs that don’t have to do directly with drug development. Its Wood Street building, for example, had pigeons — and their droppings — inside when Diwan first moved in about 10 years ago.
“We’ve spent about $14 million,” Diwan said. “That contrasts with companies that are developing just one or two drugs, and they’re spending $25 million a quarter.”
NanoViricides is one of countless companies betting on the promise of nanotechnology. That’s the science of making super-products — like medicines, bike frames and sunscreen — out of super-small particles. The pharmaceutical field regards nanotech as a huge opportunity to fight disease from the inside out.
NanoViricides is working on therapies based on the new concept for several diseases, including HIV, influenza and Dengue viruses. The company’s flu drug has consistently outperformed the leading drug, called Tamiflu, according to Diwan. Animal testing on eye drops that treat a nasty form of pink eye has been successful, and the company is developing a skin cream to fight herpes.
The company is close to starting the process — usually long and expensive, and occasionally difficult — of getting Food and Drug Administration approval for clinical testing in humans, the first step in bringing any drug to market.
Diwan, currently the chairman and president of NanoViricides, may be headed for a big payday if and when his treatments come to the marketplace. But it’s been a long road already, and the journey is far from finished.
“The initial discovery of what materials will actually work took a long, long time,” he said.
For the first few years, money was a big problem. Federal grants, the backbone of academic research funding, are cyclical, never guaranteed. Investors promised big numbers, then disappeared. And nobody wants to lend laboratory time on credit, so progress was slow.
Diwan likes to concentrate on studies outside the test tube, which are a better indicator of the effectiveness of a treatment — but also cost more. And some of the company’s initial projects focused on diseases, such as rabies and the Ebola and Marburg viruses, that generally don’t attract a lot of funding.
“With small amounts of money, you are able to do only small amounts of work,” Diwan said.
Last year, he said, was the first time the company raised what he considers a good amount of money: $10 million. This kind of cash flow is enabling NanoViricides’ leadership to start thinking about a production facility for the therapies, a key long-term part of the FDA approval process. The agency places a particular emphasis on the ability to make a consistent product.
The company is probably going to look outside Connecticut for manufacturing, breaking a long streak of Diwan’s. He’s originally from India, but landed at Rice University to complete his Ph.D. in biochemical engineering.
Diwan got a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Connecticut, then a job at Eastman Kodak Co. in New Haven. Then there was the move to Science Park, and finally West Haven.
He started tinkering with the technology that later became the “nanoviricide” by working on gene therapies in the oncology field. But viruses seemed ripe for something that was “simpler and better” than the existing treatments, Diwan said.
There was also the influence of Eugene Seymour, now the company’s CEO, who wanted to help bring in funding. Seymour was interested in viruses like HIV and influenza, so NanoViricides emerged with that focus.
The 2005 bird flu epidemic gave influenza research a new urgency. NanoViricides was able to test its therapy in Vietnam, where Diwan could get access to the virus. It worked, boosting the company’s stock price and paving the way for the consistent push for innovation that has followed.
The treatment differs for each targeted disease, Diwan said, but what came first was a focus on how virus particles always look for cells with which to bind, regardless of the virus’ makeup.
“What is staying constant? The ability to bind to the cells,” he said. “That’s where we start from.”
The delivery module, called a polymeric micelle, can fold at will. So the viral particle becomes encapsulated. In addition to breaking the virus apart, they will exit the body, taking the virus with them, Diwan said.
These kinds of treatments — using engineered nanoparticles to either carry medicine right to diseased areas, as with some cancer treatments, or to destroy viruses — are the bulwark of nanomedicine. Diwan points out that in a sense, nanomedicine is nothing new, since vaccines work on the same super-small level, and a lifesaving synthetic drug such as insulin is similarly engineered.
What’s different now, he said, is that scientists are creating machines out of these tiny materials, little engines that can search and destroy. There’s also still lots of what Diwan cals “low-lying fruit,” such as topical applications that use nanoparticles.
“I should have thought about skin creams about five years ago,” he said, chuckling.