NCBiotech Support Helped Parion Get To $1.2B Potential

Diane Villalon, Ph.D., came to Parion through an NCBiotech Industrial Fellowship Program grant. After the fellowship she became a permanent member of the research team. -- Parion Sciences photo

Funding and other support from the North Carolina Biotechnology Center helped lay important groundwork for a possible $1.2 billion influx to Durham cystic fibrosis (CF) drug developer Parion Sciences.

Boston’s Vertex Pharmaceuticals, a publicly traded company focused on CF therapies, announced plans at the end of last week to pay Parion $80 million for rights to two of its experimental CF drugs, and to potentially pay Parion $1.2 billion, plus royalties, if things pan out as hoped.

CF is a genetic, progressive and, so far, incurable disease of the mucus glands that leads to lung failure.

The Vertex agreement covers Parion's experimental therapeutics P-1037 and P-1055.

NCBiotech provided early grant funding to help support some of the research leading up to the Vertex deal with Parion (pronounced PARRY-on), a 1999 spinout from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“NCBiotech’s ability to provide funding to acquire scientific talent early in Parion’s history was an extremely valuable asset,” said Parion President Paul Boucher in a story published on the NCBiotech website last October.

The Biotech Center provided a $206,000 Institutional Development Grant to UNC in 1995 and a $100,000 Collaborative Funding Grant in 2009 that helped Parion advance its research. That was followed by a 2012 Industrial Fellowship Grant to enable a post-doctoral scientist to serve a two-year fellowship working in Parion’s labs. Parion subsequently hired the fellow, Diane Villalon, Ph.D.

Though Parion does not yet have any products on the market, the company’s unique technology for addressing the complex cellular events involving sodium and fluid imbalances in the lungs has greatly interested in the CF community.

For example, within a one-month period last year, Parion was awarded a $15.6 million, five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health supporting the company’s research into novel expectorants (mucus-releasing agents). The grants were awarded to UNC and the University of Colorado, Denver to test Parion’s approach as a way to target mucus structure and enable clearance of mucus from the lungs. Severe and chronic pulmonary disorders like CF cause sticky mucus secretions that must be cleared from the lungs.

Parion was also awarded approximately $4 million from the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation Therapeutics (CFFT) for additional research on the company’s experimental products for CF.

Parion was on the radar of Vertex and the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation when Boucher and Karl Donn, Ph.D., Parion’s vice president of drug development, attended an April 2013 venture philanthropy summit at NCBiotech.

The Summit’s keynote lunch speakers were CFF President and CEO Robert Beall, Ph.D., and Vertex’s cystic fibrosis program leader, Eric Olson. They detailed the partnership that resulted in the 2012 approval of Vertex’ groundbreaking CF treatment Kalydeco.

Besides direct financial backing, foundations like CFF also offer valuable biobank access and databases of vital information about patients with the diseases they are combating.

"As a small company, we are huge advocates of NCBiotech and rely on many of the services provided, including access to reference materials, job boards and networking events" Boucher said today.

"During our fund raising process, the Biotech Center facilitated introductions to multiple prospective companies that became serious contenders during our partnering discussions. Looking back at the 2013 Summit that hosted the pioneers of venture philanthropy, Vertex and the CF Foundation, we now find it ironic that Parion has since forged ties with both of these organizations. In 2013, Parion was progressing the project in a productive collaboration with Gilead Sciences," a reference to the California-based biopharmaceutical company which also had a Durham facility until it consolidated operations to the West Coast headquarters in late 2010.

"Many of the talented team members on the P-1037 program were introduced to Parion through the job postings submitted on the NCBiotech website," Boucher said, ending with an upbeat point enabled by the Vertex investment: "... and we are now looking to add to our team."

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