Like most other academic researchers, Dr. Pasche knows little about starting a business or courting investors, but he is getting help for the Chicago-based biotechnology company he founded, TheraBionic.
The small-business development office at Northwestern University, where Dr. Pasche was affiliated, referred him to the Illinois biotechnology trade organization, iBIO, which linked him to local biotechnology volunteers offering guidance.
They advised him on possible investors and coached him on making his pitch.
“I submitted a grant proposal to the National Institutes of Health, as this is a novel, potentially transformational, technology,” Dr. Pasche said. “This is my baby. I’d really like to see it succeed.”
TheraBionic is the sort of risky but high-potential company that might be a candidate for money under a federal program to promote commercial medical breakthroughs.
Universities and laboratories in the Chicago area have long been a source of innovations in the life sciences, but for decades inventors and entrepreneurs have often lacked the money and business savvy to bring their ideas to market.
The story of TheraBionic and dozens of similar start-ups over the past few years indicates the serious effort to raise Chicago’s standing as a commercial biotech center.
The main obstacle that start-ups face is the absence of a critical mass of daring investors like those who fuel biotechnology development on the coasts, said Michael Rosen, senior vice president for Forest City Enterprises and the Illinois Science + Technology Park in Skokie.
“The problem is very few early-stage capital investment funds,” Mr. Rosen said.
What the area does have are drug and medical products companies like Abbott Laboratories and Baxter International and the North American headquarters of such major players as Takeda and Astellas, Japan’s top two pharmaceutical companies.
In recent years, executives at those companies have begun helping fledgling entrepreneurs with the managerial, legal and other business expertise they need to commercialize their research.
The turnaround started at a trade show of BIO, the world’s largest biotechnology organization.
Chicago hosted the international BIO show in 2006, the first time the event was held outside the biotech centers on the East and West Coasts.
The event attracted 20,000 participants, a record, and the process of organizing it helped bring together the area’s often diffuse biotechnology community.
It began to focus on supporting struggling newcomers and raising their profile nationally.
“We learned a lot of people who attended the convention didn’t know much about Chicago at all,” said Dr. Norbert Riedl, Baxter’s chief scientific officer and corporate vice president.
“They didn’t know Baxter was here, Abbott, Takeda, Astellas — and world-class universities were here. It was clear we had to do more to promote those aspects of Chicago.”
Among the accomplishments after the trade show was a statewide program called Propel, modeled after an effort that helped turn San Diego into a biotechnology powerhouse.
“Propel is to train and educate entrepreneurs, to take innovation out of academic centers and place it into tech parks and allow it to flourish,” Dr. Riedel said.
Therapeutic Proteins Inc., a Deerfield company that is opening a manufacturing plant on Chicago’s South Side this spring, is one of the small local companies benefiting from Propel’s efforts.
It plans to add 30 employees to the 6 it has now when operations begin at the new plant, said Thomas L. Flynn III, its chief executive.
The company will make proteins used in generic biologic therapies that regulate blood sugar, produce blood cells and stimulate the immune system.
Propel helped Mr. Flynn by identifying contractors who could build specialized manufacturing facilities, locating a site within a technology park and steering him toward loan and grant programs that would enable his company to hire new employees.
The company settled at the tech park at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where it constructed a 12,000-square-foot production plant.
Read the original article from the Chicago News Cooperative.
