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SOUTH BRUNSWICK: Holt visits local firm

By Charles W. Kim, Managing Editor
   U.S. Rep. Rush Holt, D-12, came to visit a high-tech biomedical company Monday, to illustrate the need for more federal research funding.
   ”There’s not much funding out there for early-stage technologies,” Maxwell Stock, president and CEO of Signum Biosciences, a company on Deer Park Drive in Monmouth Junction, working on therapies for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases.
   The firm, which started in 2004 with a $1.5 million preferred stock offering, has been awarded $1 million in federal grant funding in 2010 to keep its research going.
   That is in addition to the more than $10 million it has raised through other stock offerings and private investment, according to the company’s website.
   Despite the money flowing through the company, Mr. Stock said the federal grant money for research has “kept the company alive.”
   ”The environment of the venture capitalists has changed,” Mr. Stock said. “The money that was there five years ago is just not there (now).”
   Mr. Stock said there is much more competition among firms like his for those capital dollars, and his company is now looking more to partner with bigger companies.
   ”But we will have to go back to raising capital at some point,” Mr. Stock said.
   According to the company, Glaxo-Smith-Klein, a much larger biotech firm entered into a partnership with Signum last year, helping the firm to proceed with its research.
   Mr. Holt, who has a background in the sciences field, said that many of the larger firms are drifting away from the “bench science” firms like Signum are doing and moving to the clinical aspects of getting new products out there, while partnering with firms that can handle the more experimental aspects.
   Mr. Holt said that major science-based firms like Merck, have moved away from the raw scientific research aspects of the field.
   Mr. Stock said that when a company like Signum goes out of business, it is not just the facilities and job losses that impact society, but the work the company was doing and the patents they were developing also are lost.
   ”You can have a cure for a major disease and, if that patent expires, no other company would be able to patent that,” Mr. Stock said. “It is gone forever.”
   The federal grant was disbursed during a two-year period.
   Mr. Stock said the money helped the company bridge to the partnership with Glaxo.
   ”It came at just the right time,” Mr. Stock said.
   Mr. Stock said that, in his industry, it is virtually impossible to build a business without federal science programs that are in place, unlike some other industries that could simply make due with a private loan or capital.
   ”Most of the technologies that biotech (companies) use, come from academia,” Mr. Stock said. “Academia is funded through the National Institute of Health.”
   Mr. Holt said that program alone gives out $30 billion a year in funding to scientific ventures.
   ”It funds the lion share of (life sciences) research,” Mr. Stock said. “You need to have NIH grants.”
   Mr. Holt said that half of the economy is generated from the research and development that has taken place during the last several decades.
   As an example, Mr. Holt said that the founders of Google used research in library sciences to develop the codes now used in that very profitable company.
   He also said that similar grants given years ago to scientists studying the imaging of atoms led to the modern imaging devices used in the medical field.
   ”It’s in telecommunications, energy, life sciences and transportation (technologies),” Mr. Holt said. “(These programs) are huge job creators.”