WARF's New Wrinkle
Eric Johnson wants a second bite of the poisoned apple.
The first was bittersweet. It gave the bacteriology professor the foundation for his career, and provided the material for dozens of publications, but it could have been so much more.
To clarify: the apple here is just a metaphor. The poison is literal.
By John Allen
The first was bittersweet. It gave the bacteriology professor the foundation for his career, and provided the material for dozens of publications, but it could have been so much more.
To clarify: the apple here is just a metaphor. The poison is literal.
By John Allen
Johnson is an expert in botulin — that is, botulinum toxin — one of the most poisonous substances on the planet. Two decades ago, when he was a young addition to the faculty of the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, Johnson took that first nibble under the guidance of Edward Schantz ’31, PhD’39, an emeritus professor at CALS’s Food Research Institute. Schantz was perhaps the world’s leading expert in the production of botulin, and he’d been providing the toxin — particularly a batch he’d developed in November 1979, called 79-11 — to a San Francisco ophthalmologist named Alan Scott. It was the key ingredient in an eye medicine Scott was developing called Oculinum, and Schantz and Johnson thought that Oculinum might prove successful. They went to the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), which acquires and manages patents on behalf of UW-Madison researchers, and asked WARF to patent 79-11.
But WARF was not enthusiastic — not about 79-11, or about botulin in general.
“I don’t want to get anyone there in trouble,” says Johnson, “but they kind of thought we were crazy. They didn’t think anyone would ever want to use [botulin] as a medicine.”
And, at the time, they had a point.
“In the 1980s, the world market for botulinum toxin was zero,” says Paul Pucci ’02, MBA’05, a licensing associate at WARF. Oculinum was then still being tested, and the notion of injecting a deadly substance into the muscles around a patient’s eyeball could not have seemed appealing. WARF declined the request.
And that, notes Johnson with regret, was unfortunate. “Of the 150 milligrams of botulinum toxin in that original batch, we kept back 50 for research. The rest treated some twenty thousand patients.”
In 1988, Scott sold his interest in Oculinum to Allergan, a pharmaceutical company then known chiefly for producing eye drops. The next year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved botulin batch 79-11 for the treatment of strabismus (crossed eyes) and blepharo-spasm (uncontrolled blinking). Allergan renamed the drug Botox and soon discovered that it was useful for treating a wide variety of ailments, including pediatric cerebral palsy, hemifacial spasm, and cervical dystonia or “wry neck.” And, more profitably, it made an effective wrinkle remover, turning the drug into a household name and cultural icon. According to Allergan’s 2007 annual report, Botox sales amounted to $1.2 billion last year, not one dime of which goes to Johnson, WARF, or UW-Madison.
“That was a mistake,” says Pucci. “But we try to learn from our mistakes and make better decisions going forward.”
WARF, like Johnson, is now hoping for a second, more profitable bite of the apple. In 1996, Johnson and other researchers developed a new, purer batch of botulin, which WARF did patent. In 2004, the foundation licensed it to a company called Mentor Corporation, which hopes to turn it into a Botox competitor under the name PurTox.
According to Pucci, Botox helped change the way WARF judges patent opportunities, opening the foundation to ideas that don’t seem immediately profitable. It also made Johnson far more savvy about how to find commercial opportunities in his research — and eager to recover the public renown that he and Schantz missed out on.
But WARF was not enthusiastic — not about 79-11, or about botulin in general.
“I don’t want to get anyone there in trouble,” says Johnson, “but they kind of thought we were crazy. They didn’t think anyone would ever want to use [botulin] as a medicine.”
And, at the time, they had a point.
“In the 1980s, the world market for botulinum toxin was zero,” says Paul Pucci ’02, MBA’05, a licensing associate at WARF. Oculinum was then still being tested, and the notion of injecting a deadly substance into the muscles around a patient’s eyeball could not have seemed appealing. WARF declined the request.
And that, notes Johnson with regret, was unfortunate. “Of the 150 milligrams of botulinum toxin in that original batch, we kept back 50 for research. The rest treated some twenty thousand patients.”
In 1988, Scott sold his interest in Oculinum to Allergan, a pharmaceutical company then known chiefly for producing eye drops. The next year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved botulin batch 79-11 for the treatment of strabismus (crossed eyes) and blepharo-spasm (uncontrolled blinking). Allergan renamed the drug Botox and soon discovered that it was useful for treating a wide variety of ailments, including pediatric cerebral palsy, hemifacial spasm, and cervical dystonia or “wry neck.” And, more profitably, it made an effective wrinkle remover, turning the drug into a household name and cultural icon. According to Allergan’s 2007 annual report, Botox sales amounted to $1.2 billion last year, not one dime of which goes to Johnson, WARF, or UW-Madison.
“That was a mistake,” says Pucci. “But we try to learn from our mistakes and make better decisions going forward.”
WARF, like Johnson, is now hoping for a second, more profitable bite of the apple. In 1996, Johnson and other researchers developed a new, purer batch of botulin, which WARF did patent. In 2004, the foundation licensed it to a company called Mentor Corporation, which hopes to turn it into a Botox competitor under the name PurTox.
According to Pucci, Botox helped change the way WARF judges patent opportunities, opening the foundation to ideas that don’t seem immediately profitable. It also made Johnson far more savvy about how to find commercial opportunities in his research — and eager to recover the public renown that he and Schantz missed out on.
Long Balls and Lotto
To see the House that Patents Built, go to 614 Walnut Street. It’s hard to miss: a 181-foot tower that dominates the skyline of western campus. This is the headquarters of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, and it’s one of the most obvious material legacies of the commercial success of UW research.
Founded in 1925, WARF has acquired patents on more than 1,800 UW-Madison scientists’ inventions and discoveries, and — with some 856 patents pending — the number is growing rapidly. WARF has also entered into more than 1,500 licensing agreements to bring those inventions to market, and has returned more than $900 million to the university through grants to researchers.
But most of that money, says licensing manager John Hardiman, has come from just a dozen or so patent groupings, such as Harry Steenbock’s method for irradiating milk to activate vitamin D, and further vitamin D-related inventions from Hector DeLuca MS’53, PhD’55 and fellow researchers; Karl Paul Link’s development of the blood-thinner dicumerol (and — under the name Warfarin — rat poison); Dale Wurster’s pharmaceutical tablet coating; and Folkert Belzer and James Southard’s organ transplant solution.
“This is a home-run industry,” says Hardiman, meaning that it’s the big hits that pay the bills.
WARF decides whether to try to acquire a patent based on the answers to four questions: Is the invention actually new and original? Is it useful? Is it something people would pay money for? And is it enforceable? If the answer to all four is yes, then WARF is likely to go after a patent.
But this is risky, as the patenting process costs far more than the few hundred dollars that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office requires as its filing fee. WARF must conduct what’s called a “prior art” search — in other words, it must make sure that the invention the UW scientist came up with hasn’t already been invented by someone else and isn’t obvious to someone schooled in the art. And it must answer any questions or concerns that the patent office has. The process can take years and typically costs between $10,000 and $50,000. After that, licensing managers and associates — such as Hardiman and Paul Pucci, who handle the work on UW-Madison’s purified botulin — have to negotiate a licensing agreement with a company, hoping to bring the invention to commercial success within twenty years, the lifespan of a typical patent.
Extending Hardiman’s baseball metaphor, WARF used to aim for home runs by being very selective about the pitches it swung at. But since missing out on Botox, he acknowledges, WARF has “become much more aggressive.” While in the past WARF tried to limit its patenting efforts to ideas that had obvious commercial potential, botulin showed that big opportunities can be far from obvious.
“When Ed Schantz and Eric Johnson came to WARF with botulinum toxin, there was no way of knowing what a huge market would develop,” he says. “But then that’s how revolutionary markets are — sometimes they don’t develop until the product is there.”
Currently, WARF seeks around two hundred new patents each year, not including foreign patent equivalents, and it negotiates as many as a hundred new licensing agreements annually. This more aggressive posture reflects what Brad Barham sees as a growing desire among universities to turn research into commercial success. Barham, chair of the UW’s department of agricultural economics, and associate professor Jeremy Foltz conducted a survey of more than a thousand life scientists nationwide to ask them about their commercial endeavors.
The results, published in 2007, indicate that relatively few university researchers are getting patents, but a very small number are scoring big. Some 53 percent of the scientists surveyed held no patents at all, and another 39 percent had just one. Only 8 percent were receiving patent revenue, but one researcher reported receiving $24 million, and two others $1 million each. The median gain was only $5,000.
“When your lab’s budget is $200,000 a year, that’s not a lot of money,” Barham says. Patenting, he discovered, “is really sort of like a lottery. Most people aren’t seeing much of any payoff. But the ones who are get huge returns.”
Founded in 1925, WARF has acquired patents on more than 1,800 UW-Madison scientists’ inventions and discoveries, and — with some 856 patents pending — the number is growing rapidly. WARF has also entered into more than 1,500 licensing agreements to bring those inventions to market, and has returned more than $900 million to the university through grants to researchers.
But most of that money, says licensing manager John Hardiman, has come from just a dozen or so patent groupings, such as Harry Steenbock’s method for irradiating milk to activate vitamin D, and further vitamin D-related inventions from Hector DeLuca MS’53, PhD’55 and fellow researchers; Karl Paul Link’s development of the blood-thinner dicumerol (and — under the name Warfarin — rat poison); Dale Wurster’s pharmaceutical tablet coating; and Folkert Belzer and James Southard’s organ transplant solution.
“This is a home-run industry,” says Hardiman, meaning that it’s the big hits that pay the bills.
WARF decides whether to try to acquire a patent based on the answers to four questions: Is the invention actually new and original? Is it useful? Is it something people would pay money for? And is it enforceable? If the answer to all four is yes, then WARF is likely to go after a patent.
But this is risky, as the patenting process costs far more than the few hundred dollars that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office requires as its filing fee. WARF must conduct what’s called a “prior art” search — in other words, it must make sure that the invention the UW scientist came up with hasn’t already been invented by someone else and isn’t obvious to someone schooled in the art. And it must answer any questions or concerns that the patent office has. The process can take years and typically costs between $10,000 and $50,000. After that, licensing managers and associates — such as Hardiman and Paul Pucci, who handle the work on UW-Madison’s purified botulin — have to negotiate a licensing agreement with a company, hoping to bring the invention to commercial success within twenty years, the lifespan of a typical patent.
Extending Hardiman’s baseball metaphor, WARF used to aim for home runs by being very selective about the pitches it swung at. But since missing out on Botox, he acknowledges, WARF has “become much more aggressive.” While in the past WARF tried to limit its patenting efforts to ideas that had obvious commercial potential, botulin showed that big opportunities can be far from obvious.
“When Ed Schantz and Eric Johnson came to WARF with botulinum toxin, there was no way of knowing what a huge market would develop,” he says. “But then that’s how revolutionary markets are — sometimes they don’t develop until the product is there.”
Currently, WARF seeks around two hundred new patents each year, not including foreign patent equivalents, and it negotiates as many as a hundred new licensing agreements annually. This more aggressive posture reflects what Brad Barham sees as a growing desire among universities to turn research into commercial success. Barham, chair of the UW’s department of agricultural economics, and associate professor Jeremy Foltz conducted a survey of more than a thousand life scientists nationwide to ask them about their commercial endeavors.
The results, published in 2007, indicate that relatively few university researchers are getting patents, but a very small number are scoring big. Some 53 percent of the scientists surveyed held no patents at all, and another 39 percent had just one. Only 8 percent were receiving patent revenue, but one researcher reported receiving $24 million, and two others $1 million each. The median gain was only $5,000.
“When your lab’s budget is $200,000 a year, that’s not a lot of money,” Barham says. Patenting, he discovered, “is really sort of like a lottery. Most people aren’t seeing much of any payoff. But the ones who are get huge returns.”
Passion for Poison
Eric Johnson hopes to be one of the winners of that lottery. Since coming to the UW in 1985, he’s been named as an inventor on some twenty-six patents, but the one with current home-run potential is U.S. Patent #5,512,547: “Pharmaceutical composition of botulinum neurotoxin and method of preparation,” which he and his former student Michael Goodnough ’86, MS’91, PhD’94 acquired in 1996. That formulation of botulin is the basis for PurTox.
To him, a second bite of the apple would mean more than money — it would be a chance to restore credit for botulin development to those who deserve it.
Johnson is the guardian of the UW’s role in the story of botulin. His office is literally crammed with history. Pointing to the floor-to-ceiling stacks of boxes, he shrugs and says, “There are some important papers in there, originals from Ed Schantz’s years at [the biological warfare research program at] Fort Detrick. They could have real historical value. I couldn’t just throw them away.”
The UW had botulin studies long before Schantz came to Madison in 1972, but his arrival added a titan of toxins to the university’s faculty.
“Ed was a wonderful, gentle, helpful man,” says Johnson, “who also thought that poisons were really interesting.”
As a UW graduate student, Schantz had studied milk production, but during the Second World War, he joined the army and was put to work in the biological weapons program at Maryland’s Fort Detrick. There, between 1944 and 1971, he became an expert in the purification and production of botulin, chiefly with the aim of investigating its military potential.
Considered the most toxic protein on Earth, botulin is the product of the bacterium Clostridium botulinum, which gets its name from the Latin word for sausage: botulus. It was initially discovered on tainted meat, and before Botox, botulin was chiefly known as the cause of botulism, a particularly nasty form of food poisoning. A neurotoxin, botulin does its deadly work by impeding communication between nerve and muscle cells, thus paralyzing its victims. The median lethal dose (that is, the amount that, if given to a hundred subjects, would result in death for at least fifty of them) is one billionth of a gram per kilogram of the victim’s body mass. This means that, theoretically, one kilogram of pure botulin would contain enough poison to kill every man, woman, and child on the planet.
Still, Schantz determined that the poison would make a poor weapon — the toxin is unstable and easily destroyed, and there are vaccines against it. But botulin did show several intriguing characteristics: it’s specific, meaning that it can be targeted to particular nerve groups; its effects last for a long time; and its high toxicity — the lethal dose is lower than the amount necessary to raise antibodies against it — means that it can slip past a body’s defenses. These elements all made it intriguing to doctors in search of new medications, including Alan Scott, creator of Oculinum.
“Although the paralyzing action of botulinum toxin had been known and studied by several physiologists for many years, it was never visualized at the time as a means of treatment for control over nervous diseases causing involuntary muscle activity in the human body,” Schantz wrote. “The use of botulinum toxin in medicine for the treatment of human disease was an entirely new concept.”
The intriguing possibility of medicinal botulin stuck with Schantz, even after the United States joined the Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention and shut down Fort Detrick’s botulin operation. Schantz returned to his alma mater, taking along his poisons and his contacts. From his lab at the UW’s Food Research Institute, he continued to culture C. botulinum in glass jugs, purifying batches of the poison and shipping samples to “any reputable laboratory,” he wrote.
“Ed was very generous,” says Johnson. “He shared his botulinum toxin openly, and at little profit to himself. I don’t think there was a piece of botulinum research done anywhere that Ed didn’t have a hand in.”
When Johnson joined the faculty in 1985, Schantz brought him into the botulin-producing business, enticing him with the poison’s possibilities. “It’s fascinating to me that something so poisonous can be used as a medication,” says Johnson. He took over the production business as Schantz withdrew into retirement, and when the older scientist passed away in 2005, Johnson eulogized him in university publications.
He also defends Schantz’s role from what he feels are slights from the Botox crowd. “Allergan likes to imply that they developed botulinum toxin all on their own,” he says. “Well, they can’t get away with saying that kind of thing when I’m in the room.”
Although Schantz and Johnson didn’t land a patent on 79-11, the two scientists continued to work on botulin. Johnson’s lab produced toxin —and antibodies specific to it — and sold the material to researchers and commercial entities, with the profits going to support the lab.
“It was a nice little business,” Johnson says. “It helped fund our lab, and it meant that we weren’t as dependent on grants as other researchers are.” It also became a training ground for Schantz’s academic heirs — Johnson and the students who came through his lab.
Eventually, the university required that the botulin business move off campus. It wasn’t considered research, and so the university felt it shouldn’t take up lab space or time, and further, increasing security concerns were making it impossible for Johnson to use students in his lab. “I’d have to get FBI clearance for them,” Johnson says, “and that just takes too long.” And so Johnson’s former students Michael Goodnough and Carl Malizio ’88 spun the poison-making enterprise off as a new company, Metabiologics. Located at the UW’s research park, it continues to produce botulin for government and university labs and has seen growth of between 20 and 30 percent a year since 2004, according to Goodnough.
But for Johnson, also a Metabiologics board member, commercial ambition is just a sideline. “I don’t know business,” he says. “I know toxin.” And what he wants is to see botulin’s role as a medication grow.
To him, a second bite of the apple would mean more than money — it would be a chance to restore credit for botulin development to those who deserve it.
Johnson is the guardian of the UW’s role in the story of botulin. His office is literally crammed with history. Pointing to the floor-to-ceiling stacks of boxes, he shrugs and says, “There are some important papers in there, originals from Ed Schantz’s years at [the biological warfare research program at] Fort Detrick. They could have real historical value. I couldn’t just throw them away.”
The UW had botulin studies long before Schantz came to Madison in 1972, but his arrival added a titan of toxins to the university’s faculty.
“Ed was a wonderful, gentle, helpful man,” says Johnson, “who also thought that poisons were really interesting.”
As a UW graduate student, Schantz had studied milk production, but during the Second World War, he joined the army and was put to work in the biological weapons program at Maryland’s Fort Detrick. There, between 1944 and 1971, he became an expert in the purification and production of botulin, chiefly with the aim of investigating its military potential.
Considered the most toxic protein on Earth, botulin is the product of the bacterium Clostridium botulinum, which gets its name from the Latin word for sausage: botulus. It was initially discovered on tainted meat, and before Botox, botulin was chiefly known as the cause of botulism, a particularly nasty form of food poisoning. A neurotoxin, botulin does its deadly work by impeding communication between nerve and muscle cells, thus paralyzing its victims. The median lethal dose (that is, the amount that, if given to a hundred subjects, would result in death for at least fifty of them) is one billionth of a gram per kilogram of the victim’s body mass. This means that, theoretically, one kilogram of pure botulin would contain enough poison to kill every man, woman, and child on the planet.
Still, Schantz determined that the poison would make a poor weapon — the toxin is unstable and easily destroyed, and there are vaccines against it. But botulin did show several intriguing characteristics: it’s specific, meaning that it can be targeted to particular nerve groups; its effects last for a long time; and its high toxicity — the lethal dose is lower than the amount necessary to raise antibodies against it — means that it can slip past a body’s defenses. These elements all made it intriguing to doctors in search of new medications, including Alan Scott, creator of Oculinum.
“Although the paralyzing action of botulinum toxin had been known and studied by several physiologists for many years, it was never visualized at the time as a means of treatment for control over nervous diseases causing involuntary muscle activity in the human body,” Schantz wrote. “The use of botulinum toxin in medicine for the treatment of human disease was an entirely new concept.”
The intriguing possibility of medicinal botulin stuck with Schantz, even after the United States joined the Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention and shut down Fort Detrick’s botulin operation. Schantz returned to his alma mater, taking along his poisons and his contacts. From his lab at the UW’s Food Research Institute, he continued to culture C. botulinum in glass jugs, purifying batches of the poison and shipping samples to “any reputable laboratory,” he wrote.
“Ed was very generous,” says Johnson. “He shared his botulinum toxin openly, and at little profit to himself. I don’t think there was a piece of botulinum research done anywhere that Ed didn’t have a hand in.”
When Johnson joined the faculty in 1985, Schantz brought him into the botulin-producing business, enticing him with the poison’s possibilities. “It’s fascinating to me that something so poisonous can be used as a medication,” says Johnson. He took over the production business as Schantz withdrew into retirement, and when the older scientist passed away in 2005, Johnson eulogized him in university publications.
He also defends Schantz’s role from what he feels are slights from the Botox crowd. “Allergan likes to imply that they developed botulinum toxin all on their own,” he says. “Well, they can’t get away with saying that kind of thing when I’m in the room.”
Although Schantz and Johnson didn’t land a patent on 79-11, the two scientists continued to work on botulin. Johnson’s lab produced toxin —and antibodies specific to it — and sold the material to researchers and commercial entities, with the profits going to support the lab.
“It was a nice little business,” Johnson says. “It helped fund our lab, and it meant that we weren’t as dependent on grants as other researchers are.” It also became a training ground for Schantz’s academic heirs — Johnson and the students who came through his lab.
Eventually, the university required that the botulin business move off campus. It wasn’t considered research, and so the university felt it shouldn’t take up lab space or time, and further, increasing security concerns were making it impossible for Johnson to use students in his lab. “I’d have to get FBI clearance for them,” Johnson says, “and that just takes too long.” And so Johnson’s former students Michael Goodnough and Carl Malizio ’88 spun the poison-making enterprise off as a new company, Metabiologics. Located at the UW’s research park, it continues to produce botulin for government and university labs and has seen growth of between 20 and 30 percent a year since 2004, according to Goodnough.
But for Johnson, also a Metabiologics board member, commercial ambition is just a sideline. “I don’t know business,” he says. “I know toxin.” And what he wants is to see botulin’s role as a medication grow.
The Second Bite
To see Madison’s Houses that Botulin Built, travel to the University Research Park on the city’s southwest side. There, two buildings bear the name Mentor Biologics. One manufactures the poison; the other will freeze-dry it for transport. But none of the drug is currently being sold, as PurTox awaits approval by the FDA. The drug is in its third and final phase of clinical trials for cosmetic uses, and the first phase for therapeutic uses.
Mentor Biologics is owned by Mentor Corporation, a company based in Santa Barbara, California. Before taking on PurTox and entering the botulin sweepstakes, the firm was best known for manufacturing breast implants. PurTox marks a completely new line of business for Mentor, which is why the company built its botulin factory in Madison.
“Mentor Biologics has just one product,” says vice president AnnaMarie Daniels, “and that’s PurTox. We want to be in Madison to be close to Eric Johnson and his expertise.”
The UW-created, newer variety of botulin, Mentor believes, is better than the stuff that’s in Botox. “It’s a highly purified, extremely well characterized form of the toxin,” Daniels says. She believes that purity gives PurTox a superior composition, and she hopes that this, as well as the cachet of a connection to Ed Schantz’s intellectual heirs, will enable Mentor to expand its role beyond cosmetic medicine and break into therapeutic treatments.
“When Americans hear botulinum toxin, they immediately think of wrinkles,” she says. “But worldwide, at least half the market is therapeutic, for the treatment of neuromuscular disorders.”
Mentor’s investment in Madison shows that the company has high hopes for PurTox, but there are also considerable risks. Not only does Botox dominate the botulin market, but there are other competitors as well. Under the names Dysport and Reloxin, the French pharmaceutical company Ipsen produces botulin, and the U.S. firm Solstice
Neurosciences produces a variety of the toxin under the name Myobloc.
Although PurTox may not turn out to be a home run, Hardiman says that Mentor’s willingness to gamble on botulin — and to open a facility in Madison — illustrates one important way that the toxin is already offering a return to the university. The arrival of Mentor supports not only Johnson, by providing him with a commercial outlet for his research, but it also aids Metabiologics, as it will draw on that firm’s techniques and expertise. Goodnough, like Johnson, is party to the PurTox patent, and he, Johnson, and Malizio are acting as consultants for Mentor Biologics. The business may give Metabiologics the capital and the workload to expand beyond its current two-employee base, as well as attract a wide variety of bioscience jobs to the Madison area.
“We think we can build a critical mass in town around biotech research,” Goodnough says. “The more companies that we can locate here near campus, the more opportunities we can create here for scientists and researchers. And the more opportunities there are, the more of them will want to be part of the university.”
But Johnson hopes to guard Schantz’s botulin legacy, so Madison’s economy is a secondary concern. His goal is to secure a little of the public renown that he feels his mentor missed out on.
“Ed had the foresight back in the forties to see that this could be something,” Johnson says. “Botulinum toxin has been really valuable and fundamental in expanding our understanding of biology and disease. It’s led to some fundamental discoveries in basic biology.”
John Allen is senior editor of On Wisconsin — although the botulin treatments make him look more like a junior editor.
Mentor Biologics is owned by Mentor Corporation, a company based in Santa Barbara, California. Before taking on PurTox and entering the botulin sweepstakes, the firm was best known for manufacturing breast implants. PurTox marks a completely new line of business for Mentor, which is why the company built its botulin factory in Madison.
“Mentor Biologics has just one product,” says vice president AnnaMarie Daniels, “and that’s PurTox. We want to be in Madison to be close to Eric Johnson and his expertise.”
The UW-created, newer variety of botulin, Mentor believes, is better than the stuff that’s in Botox. “It’s a highly purified, extremely well characterized form of the toxin,” Daniels says. She believes that purity gives PurTox a superior composition, and she hopes that this, as well as the cachet of a connection to Ed Schantz’s intellectual heirs, will enable Mentor to expand its role beyond cosmetic medicine and break into therapeutic treatments.
“When Americans hear botulinum toxin, they immediately think of wrinkles,” she says. “But worldwide, at least half the market is therapeutic, for the treatment of neuromuscular disorders.”
Mentor’s investment in Madison shows that the company has high hopes for PurTox, but there are also considerable risks. Not only does Botox dominate the botulin market, but there are other competitors as well. Under the names Dysport and Reloxin, the French pharmaceutical company Ipsen produces botulin, and the U.S. firm Solstice
Neurosciences produces a variety of the toxin under the name Myobloc.
Although PurTox may not turn out to be a home run, Hardiman says that Mentor’s willingness to gamble on botulin — and to open a facility in Madison — illustrates one important way that the toxin is already offering a return to the university. The arrival of Mentor supports not only Johnson, by providing him with a commercial outlet for his research, but it also aids Metabiologics, as it will draw on that firm’s techniques and expertise. Goodnough, like Johnson, is party to the PurTox patent, and he, Johnson, and Malizio are acting as consultants for Mentor Biologics. The business may give Metabiologics the capital and the workload to expand beyond its current two-employee base, as well as attract a wide variety of bioscience jobs to the Madison area.
“We think we can build a critical mass in town around biotech research,” Goodnough says. “The more companies that we can locate here near campus, the more opportunities we can create here for scientists and researchers. And the more opportunities there are, the more of them will want to be part of the university.”
But Johnson hopes to guard Schantz’s botulin legacy, so Madison’s economy is a secondary concern. His goal is to secure a little of the public renown that he feels his mentor missed out on.
“Ed had the foresight back in the forties to see that this could be something,” Johnson says. “Botulinum toxin has been really valuable and fundamental in expanding our understanding of biology and disease. It’s led to some fundamental discoveries in basic biology.”
John Allen is senior editor of On Wisconsin — although the botulin treatments make him look more like a junior editor.
