Endowed Chairs:
New endowed chair has experience with startups
By Dan McCue
Staff Writer
About 16 years ago, Kenneth D. Tew received a telephone call from a friend of a friend whom he had met briefly while the caller was doing his post-doctoral work in biology.
“By this time, however, he had given up science for money and was working for a venture capital firm on Wall Street,” said Tew, holder of the John C. West Endowed Chair in Cancer Research at the Medical University of South Carolina. “Specifically, he was doing his due diligence, trying to determine whether a San Francisco startup was worth investing in.”
The man called on Tew because he knew the scientist’s research and knew the company was pursing similar ends. He asked Tew to act as an independent sounding board on the company’s prospects.
After that conversation and several follow-up calls, the company—then called Terrapin Technologies due to its owner’s penchant for the Grateful Dead—had its money, and Tew was asked by the venture capital firm to serve on the drug company’s board of advisors.
The company, since renamed Telik Inc., has developed a promising ovarian cancer drug called Telcyta that’s made it through initial clinical trials and is now awaiting approval by the Federal Drug Administration.
Although Tew is no longer involved with the company, he said he still receives telephone calls from Wall Street analysts who want to know about the drug’s prospects.
“FDA approval of a drug has a tremendous positive impact on the stock of the company that makes it,” he said. “I think this drug has a very good chance of receiving that approval.”
In another case, a private Massachusetts-based company called Novelos Therapeutics Inc., provided Tew with a $150,000 research grant to allow him to analyze a cancer drug they were developing.
“That kind of money is tremendously important, because it gives you the opportunity to bring new researchers in at the start of their career and energizes the research environment,” Tew said. “Here in Charleston, I have people I worked with in Philadelphia, someone from the National Institute of Health, the University of South Carolina, Harvard University, Emory University and the University of Virginia.”
This coming March, Tew is planning to extend his interaction with business and economic development even further. He’s currently at work planning the 2007 Hollings Cancer Center Spring Symposium, which will be held at The Sanctuary on Kiawah Island, March 22-24.
The session, he said, will focus on the science, clinical testing and business aspects underlying the development of novel cancer therapeutics.
“We’re going to bring together academics, big bio-firms, venture capitalists, government officials and local business people to try to give greater support to the region’s commercial bioscience applications,” he said.
“To do something like this, to truly foster the emergence of a biosciences cluster, takes a real big commitment. The challenge here in South Carolina is that while the politicians have created the Center of Excellence and so forth, they don’t really have a history of exhibiting vision when it comes to deep science. They’re far more interested in focusing on something like BMW. Our hope is that the symposium will be a vehicle for turning that around.”
Dan McCue is a staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail him at dmccue@charlestonbusiness.com.
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