If he was not already busy running his company researching and designing drugs to treat Alzheimer’s, depression and traumatic brain injury, Dr. Mark Gurney would give
Jonathan Goldsmith a run for his money as "the most interesting man in the world."
He was named one of the two leading inventors in the world in the creation of patents to treat Alzheimer’s disease.
He commuted weekly for four years from Grand Rapids to Iceland and modestly mentions that he introduced “beer-can chicken” to his Icelandic colleagues.
He is developing a hatch guide for fly fishing in the Rogue River
He is a member of the
Grand Angels, an advisor to the State of Michigan’s Accelerator Fund-1 and big fan of the artisan pasta sold at the Fulton Street Farmer’s Market. And if he had a preference for beer, it would be local.
Ladies and Gentlemen, meet Dr. Mark Gurney, the Grand Rapids resident and founder of Tetra Discovery Partners LLC (Tetra).
Tetra is a lean, biotech startup focused on developing innovative treatments for depression, Alzheimer’s and traumatic brain injury. The core research is focused on developing drugs that inhibit phosphodiesterase 4 (PDE4), a key enzyme in the brain that controls the biochemical process of memory. There is an image of the enzyme on Tetra’s
website that Dr. Gurney refers to as the “magic” of his team’s research.
“Earlier compounds that treat those conditions have side effects. What we have been able to do at Tetra is separate the side effects from the benefits so we can make compounds have a much better tolerability," Gurney says.
Although the notion of a “lean startup” is fairly well known in the technology sector, it is much less so in biotech where
the average cost of drug development by traditional pharmaceutical companies costs at least $4 billion and can be as much as $11 billion.
By utilizing lean principles to drive the business model, Tetra features a collaborative and distributed network of expert researchers, minimal support staff and a combination of public and private funding sources. To further reduce overhead, the firm has an office and a shared laboratory in the
West Michigan Science and Technology Initiative (WMSTI), a life science incubator.
Besides technological advances that make collaboration between researchers possible, Dr. Gurney explains that economic forces are also enabling biotech startups. “What is happening now [is] pharmaceutical companies are reorganizing and leaving certain therapeutic areas. They cannot afford it. Particularly impacted are psychiatric and neurological diseases. Many firms stopped all research on drugs. The Director of National Institutes of Health (NIH) recognizes that this is an issue, so there are programs at the NIH directed towards filling the gap, using public money to help small companies. The lean model is a collaboration network," Gurney explains. "It works because we all do our bit. It is a very efficient capital model. Every dollar we spend goes into the project."
Working with fewer resources then traditional drug manufacturers does not mean a lesser impact or a smaller business. Just recently, Tetra announced a five-year cooperative agreement with the NIH that also included an award of up to $1.5 million in direct funding and access to additional research services valued at over approximately $8.5 million to support efforts in designing drugs to treat Alzheimer’s.
For a perspective on scale, the Bay Area FerroKin BioSciences, a lean biotech startup, was operated from the founder’s house. It had a virtual staff of seven and utilized 60 vendors for outsourced support. It was recently acquired in a $325 million deal.
Dr. Gurney credits both “the inner-entrepreneur” and a desire to continue working with former colleagues as two of the catalysts for founding Tetra. “I worked hard with a group of colleagues to launch a project involving this enzyme (phos4)," he says. "When I started Tetra, I wanted to bring the team back together."
For a layperson, the science behind Tetra’s research can be daunting to understand. What is not hard to understand, however, is the impact that the treatments can have on the individuals afflicted with these diseases, as well as their family and friends.
It is estimated that over 20 million people suffer from some form of depression. Alzheimer’s is the leading cause of dementia and with [traumatic brain injury], the estimated 5.3 million Americans with a brain injury are only the tip of the iceberg considering there is very little known about the lingering effects of concussions.
“I met a women who was thrown out of a pickup truck while on an eco-tour," Dr. Gurney recalls. "A few years later, she went back to college and still has cognitive issues. If you had a drug that could treat the damaged brain, what a tremendous impact.”
With his a PhD, MBA and years teaching at The University of Chicago and Northwestern University Medical Schools before moving to the pharmaceutical industry in senior positions, Dr. Gurney could live anywhere in the world, but chooses to make Grand Rapids his home. “My wife and I are committed to Michigan," he says. "It has everything we need. The quality of life, initiatives like ArtPrize and a community that makes starting businesses cool."
John Rumery is the Innovation and Jobs Editor at Rapid Growth Media. He has a bit of an eclectic background; corporate sales, international business, entrepreneur, specialty retailer, educator, blogger, writer, and competitive barbecuer. John is active in several community organizations including having a bi-weekly, live radio show on 88.1 WYCE (Uncle John), board member of aimWest, co-organizer and evangelist for Startup Weekend West Michigan and is very involved in several entrepreneurial initiatives at GRCC.
PHOTOS:
Mark Gurney stands in one of the many Tetra Discovery laboratories.
Photography by
ADAM BIRD