New Vaccine Firm Gets Its Start In Framingham | Founder will take the company to the West Coast
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Lance K. Gordon, founder of ImmunoBiologics Corp. of Framingham.
Gordon, who has had a long career developing vaccines, created the company along with Jeffrey D. Wager, a partner in Apeiron Partners LLC, a private investment bank in Framingham that focuses on life sciences companies. Gordon has invested his own money and Apeiron Partners is also funding the company. Wager was also an investor in an earlier company that Gordon created called Oravax Inc. in Cambridge.
Shot In The Arm
Gordon said the new company, ImmunoBiologics Corp., is focused on human vaccines and anti-infective monoclonal antibodies for life-threatening diseases, although he declined to be more specific until the company announces its first product.
Monoclonal antibodies are produced in the laboratory to react against a specific antigen, like a toxin, bacteria or virus and can be used much as an antibiotic would be. Vaccines are also produced in the laboratory but work by stimulating a person’s body to produce antibody or other forms of immunity that last for years.
Gordon did say that the product has already gone through Phase I and Phase II clinical trials, and it should start Phase III trials in the near future.
Gordon invented the vaccine for infant meningitis, which is given to 95 percent of children in the U.S. as part of their childhood vaccines.
“Working on vaccines is a very exciting area and a very important one. It’s the only area I know of where a truly successful product becomes used by everyone,” Gordon said in a recent interview about his new company and why he remains interested in vaccines.
Most people under 20 years old in the U.S. have had one of the vaccines his company developed or a follow-on vaccine to the original ones, he said.
While at Oravax Inc., the Cambridge company he founded that was later sold, he secured a contract to make and stockpile 40 million doses of smallpox vaccine for the Centers for Disease Control.
He also founded North American Vaccines Inc. of Maryland, which he led as a CEO. It licensed a new vaccine for whooping cough. Baxter International Inc. bought the company in 1999 for a stock deal valued at $390 million.
Most recently, Gordon was president and CEO of VaxGen Inc. of California, which developed an HIV vaccine that was not effective and an anthrax vaccine. VaxGen lost the contract with the National Institutes of Health to develop the anthrax vaccine after it missed preliminary deadlines, although the company said it had solved technical issues that held up the process. Gordon left VaxGen in early 2007 and started ImmunoBiologics in September 2007.
Gordon said his new company has hired Roman M. Chicz as its vice president of research, who will be heading out to the West Coast very soon. Chicz was most recently Antigenics Inc.’s senior vice president of research and preclinical development. Antigenics is a New York-based company with a research facility in Lexington.
Antigenics makes cancer vaccines that are being evaluated and is also working on products for infectious and autoimmune diseases.
Chicz also founded ZYCOS Inc., a Lexington, Mass.-based company that developed genetic-based drugs, which was acquired by another company.
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