Biotech work runs into politics

Allan Robins’ work lands him squarely at the intersection of science and politics.

His firm, BresaGen, moved to Athens in 2000, in part because the company couldn’t do all of its stem cell work in Australia, where the firm got its start. At the time, it was illegal to harvest stem cells in some Australian states.

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Paul Efland

Allan Robins hopes to have a diabetes-related product in the market by 2016-17.

The Allan Robins file
Chief technical officer and vice president, BresaGen and Novocell
• Age: 54
• Hometown: Adelaide, Australia
• Residence: Athens
• Family: Wife, Denise; daughter, Lauren, 28; son, Joshua, 20
• Hobbies: Reading, exercising and dog-showing (Robins owns and shows Newfoundland and Portuguese Water dogs; he and his wife are judges.)
• What he's reading now: "The Omnivore's Dilemma" by Michael Pollan
• Most-played on his iPod: "Get Yer Ya-Yas Out," a live album by The Rolling Stones.
• Favorite quote: "Great spirits have often encountered violent opposition from weak minds," Albert Einstein

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A year later, BresaGen took center stage in a political compromise over stem cell research in the United States. President George W. Bush, who opposed stem cell research on moral grounds, became the first president to allow federal funding for it. But he restricted the research to a small number of existing stem cell lines, including those held by BresaGen.

Today, Robins — whose company became part of Novocell of San Diego, Calif., in 2004 — says the political change in Washington means new opportunities for the industry. President Barack Obama in March lifted most funding restrictions on stem cell research, making new lines eligible for National Institutes of Health funds.

Robins says politics closer to home worries him now. A bill to restrict embryonic stem cell research in Georgia passed the state Senate in the spring legislative session, before dying in a House committee.

Robins said Senate Bill 169 “sends the wrong message” to the biotechnology industry, just as the state prepares to host the BIO International Convention, a biotechnology gathering at the Georgia World Congress Center, which starts Monday and ends Thursday.

Q: What do you think of Georgia’s efforts to turn itself into a biotech hub?

A: There are a lot of attractive things about Georgia — the weather; the people; we have good universities here. The GRA [Georgia Research Alliance] has done a great job building infrastructure and supporting research. But this SB 169 is a negative … With this bill, you wouldn’t be allowed to isolate new stem cell lines in Georgia. It would be illegal.

Q: When President Bush included your stem cell lines among those that could get federal funds for research, did that create a competitive advantage for BresaGen?

A: It’s not like we were trying to create a monopoly on our stem cell lines. We distributed them to other researchers. … We had three of the 21 lines. We did receive NIH [National Institutes of Health] grants to distribute those cells, so that was an advantage.

Q: How much was your funding for distributing the stem cells?

A: We had just under $5 million in NIH grants.

Q: What effect could the passage of a bill like SB 169 have on your business?

A: We’re here in Athens because the state has been supportive, and we’ve gotten good research done here. I think if this bill got passed, it would be very difficult to justify why we would stay here.

Q: What’s the status of your research and development?

A: We’re focused on diabetes, which is not what BresaGen originally was focused on. BresaGen was focused on Parkinson’s disease, but the end points are easier to measure in diabetes than Parkinson’s. Our plan is human trials in 2011. … The first trial is to test the safety of the product on 10 to 30 diabetic patients. There’s some chance we will see efficacy, but it is such a small population.

Q: What exactly is your product? How would it work?

A: Stem cells would go through a process called differentiation that specializes them and turns them into one specific cell type, in this case for the pancreas. Then they would be encapsulated to protect them from the immune system of the patient and implanted [under the skin] … It takes a couple of months for the stem cells to mature into cells that make and secrete insulin. It would be 60, maybe even 90 days before we would see results.

Q: How does this differ from the work you were doing on Parkinson’s disease?

A: Parkinson’s disease results would take up to a year. The cells for Parkinson’s disease have to integrate into the brain. … It could even be two years.

Q: For your diabetes work, what would success look like?

A: If one could reduce insulin use and, secondarily, see a better control of blood glucose — that would be an enormous success.

Q: What is the risk?

A: That the cells won’t appropriately control blood glucose. We think that risk is small because we haven’t seen it happen in animal trials.

Q: What’s the hoped-for time frame for selling your diabetes-related product?

A: Our plan is to see a product in the marketplace about 2016 or 2017. Of course, the farther out you try to predict something, the less certain you are about it.