Drug firm moves to Medical Center
A Utah-based pharmaceutical company that has discovered a drug to battle a rare pediatric bone cancer is moving its operations to Houston after winning a coveted grant, the company’s CEO said Wednesday.
Salarius Pharmaceuticals, formerly headquartered in Salt Lake City, has already begun setting up shop in the newly opened JLABS @ TMC, a business incubator formed in a partnership between Johnson & Johnson and the Texas Medical Center to provide lab space and support for biotech and medical startups.
“We are very excited about coming. This is a fabulous opportunity,” Salarius CEO David Arthur said in an interview.
Although the company
was also being wooed by another state, Arthur said he jumped at the chance to relocate to Houston after learning Salarius had been awarded an $18.69 million grant from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas. One of the criteria for the award is being located in the state.
Arthur said he got word of the grant on May 18 and put his house on the market the next day.
He called Houston “a very attractive location to work in biotechnology.” He is especially drawn to the JLABS@TMC location just down the street from not only the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center but also Texas Children’s Hospital.
Salarius is developing a drug to combat Ewings sarcoma, a rare bone cancer that strikes children. Currently there is no targeted therapy for the disease, only radiation, chemotherapy and surgery. The drug discovery was made about two years ago at the Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah based on research by Dr. Sunil Sharma.
Arthur said the company is working with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to begin testing the still-unnamed drug on humans.
“We will begin Phase I clinical trials by the end of the year,” he said.
Arthur said his company has two employees now but plans to hire about 18 more over the next few years as it hastens the march toward commercialization.
The Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas is the state’s $3 billion taxpayer-funded assault on cancer. Approved by voters in 2007 and launched in 2009, it allows the state to award up to $300 million annually in grant money, mostly for research into how to better treat the disease. To date, it has awarded 1,033 grants totaling more than $1.57 billion.
The Salarius grant is an example of the agency’s recent shift to emphasize pediatric cancers and product development.
The program has weathered its share of controversy with critics alleging mismanaged funds and under-performance, but Arthur said that will have no impact on his grant.