ThermoFisher Aims to Get FDA OK for its Ion Torrent PGM

By Paula Myers

At this year’s CHI Molecular Medicine Tri-Conference at the Moscone Convention Center, San Francisco, February 11th, there were over 3000 attendees and more than 200 exhibitors. I visited some of the many booths on the exhibit floor. One of those was the ThermoFisher booth. I spoke with Zhen Mahoney,Sr. Clinical Sales Specialist/Pharma Business. Mahoney talked about the acquisition of Life Technology and how it affects ThermoFisher.  Thermo will have to absorb Life’s 9,000 employees. Thermo currently has 40,000 employees. Mahoney pointed out that Life has a broad product portfolio. Ion Torrent, which Life acquired in 2010, is located at Oyster Point near South San Francisco. The rest of company is located at Carlsbad, California, near San Diego, including the Invitrogen and Gibco brands. These groups are staying intact, according to Mahoney.

She also pointed out that the company submitted an application for 510K marketing clearance to the FDA for its Ion PGM system for use as a diagnostics medical device. They are hoping for a 3 to 4 month approval timeframe. By comparison, the Illumina MiSeq took about 9 months to get FDA 510K approval because it was the first of its kind. The Illumina MiSeq received a relatively fast approval because the company worked closely with FDA reviewers so that they can understand its technology. The MiSeq platform serves as a template to the FDA for follow-on platforms from Illumina and other desktop sequencer vendors. Mahoney said that the next revision for their Ion Torrent electronic P-2 Chip is coming later in 2014. It will have 660 million wells.

Some of the other firms that I visited included: Guardant Health, Diagenode, and Epitomics. I focused on companies involved in epigenetics. Guardant Health is a two-year-old service company for individuals. In February, they released GUARDANT360, the first pan-cancer blood test that provides doctors with real-time genetic information to help them prescribe the right treatments for their cancer patients.

  Diagenode is a company originally from Belgium and sells Japanese made disruptor shearing machines such as the Bioruptor Pico for DNA, chromatin, and RNA shearing. Epitomics, located in Burlingame, California, offers custom antibody services for use in epigenetics research. Li Fang, Project Manager of Custom Antibody Services at Epitomics, said that Abcam is buying the company. Abcam is a supplier of antibodies,proteins, kits and reagents.

iPhone 5 More Powerful than the Curiosity Mars Rover

SAN FRANCISCO (Takeda Pacific HighTech Reports), Moscone West, January 30, 2013 — MacWorld/iWorld 2013.  NASA experts spoke about NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover and its connection to Apple products at a meeting here.  The session was titled “Software, Hardware, and Flying to Mars. How We Built, Programmed and Operate NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover.”  David Oh, Lead Flight Director and Software Engineer at JPL/Caltech Mars Science Lab, asked the question, “Why are we at MacWorld?”  The answer was shown in a slide of the NASA control room at the JPL in Pasadena, California.  On the desk was a mixture of Apple products such as MacBook Pros, iPhones and iPads during the Rover’s Mars landing.  The Macs were running Mac OS X.

Ben Cichy, Chief Flight Software Engineer, compared the processing power of the iPhone 5 to Curiosity’s processing power.  The iPhone 5 has 1.3 GHz and the Curiosity has only 132 MHz.  In addition, the iPhone 5 has 1GB of memory and 64GB of storage and the Rover has 128MB of memory and 4GB of storage.  The cost of an iPhone 5 is $399 while the cost of the Curiosity was $1.8 billion.

During the session, the audience was shown a video of the landing of the Curiosity on Mars.  It only took 7 minutes, but a very tense 7 minutes.  It was very exciting watching the landing of the Mars Rover all over again.  “The Rover’s goal is to explore and see if Mars ever sustained life or is now,” Ben said.

David showed a slide that described the different parts that make up the Rover.  He added that the heart of the mission is the SAM (Sample Analysis at Mars).  The SAM analyzes the chemical and isotopic composition of the planet’s atmosphere and surface.  He said that the “Curiosity has two brains (computers) in its belly.  One is the primary computer and the other is the backup.”  This time social media plays a big part in providing people access to seeing what is happening with the Curiosity as it explores the surface of Mars.  The Curiosity has its own Facebook page and iPhone app.

OvaScience, Seattle Genetics, and Qiagen Present at 31st J.P. Morgan Heathcare Event

This year’s 2013 J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference at the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco (January 7  to 10) had around 8400 attendees and around 400 company presentations.  Navigating through the hallways to the numerous presentations was a challenge.  These are three of the many company presentations I attended.

OvaScience’s CEO Michelle Dipp gave a very interesting presentation about new infertility treatment options. The U.S. fertility market is over $4 billion and it is seeing rapid worldwide growth, said Dipp.  Some other interesting statistics included that every year there are 7.3 million childbearing women that are infertile and 1.2 million women seeking treatment.  There are over 400 IVF clinics in the U.S.  Most of them are in the East and West Coast.  Unfortunately, most IVF treatments fail because many women are delaying childbirth. Apparently, energy in eggs decreases with age.

OvaScience has discovered that adding mitochondria to human eggs increases IVF success. The company’s new approach to infertility is called the Egg Precursor Cell (EggPC).  The discovery of these EggPCs (germline stem cells) that mature into eggs offers new fertility treatment options, said Dipp.

The company has two product candidates that include Augment and OvaTure.  There is a study underway for the firm’s first product, Augment.  Augment uses EggPC mitochondria to rejuvenate eggs.  The company’s second product OvaTure involves fresh, young, healthy eggs matured in the lab from EggPCs.  The OvaTure program is currently being designed.  According to Dipp, the goal is to improve the IVF success rate for older women while reducing the number of embryos that need to be transferred to the uterus thus decreasing the number of multiple births.  That would be great news for the many infertile women who could benefit from this treatment and not have to worry about the potential of multiple births.

Seattle Genetics’ President and CEO Clay Siegall began his presentation with the company’s key value drivers.  They include building the Adcetris franchise, advancing the antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) pipeline and technology along with its strong financial position and collaborations to fund a very robust research.  Adcetris targets the CD30 cell membrane protein, which is expressed on the surface of certain types of lymphoma cells.  Adcetris is FDA approved for relapsed Hodgkin lymphoma and systemic anaplastic large cell lymphoma.

The firm also received EU approval for Adcetris in October 2012.  Seattle Genetics has 20 internal and collaborator ongoing clinical programs for Hodgkin lymphoma and other cancers.  The company has collaborations with Millennium/Takeda, Genentech, Celldex, Bayer, and Abbott just to name a few.  According to Siegall, “ADC collaborations have generated over $200 million to date with the potential for around $3.8 billion in future milestones plus royalties.”  Net product sales of Adcetris since launch in August 2011 are over $145 million.  Siegall said they are “making strong progress towards a fully global brand.”

Peer Schatz, President and CEO at QIAGEN N.V., began by saying that “2012 was a very important and successful year.”  He said that QIAsymphony is the company’s fastest growing product in molecular diagnostic placements with Europe being the biggest at 40 percent and the U.S. coming in at 35 percent.  Another of its products is the Therascreen KRAS test, a companion diagnostic for metastatic colon cancer to help guide doctors in the use of Erbitux.  “The U.S. KRAS market conversion is progressing well.  Doctors are demanding the Therascreen test,” said Schatz.

Over the next 2 years, the firm will be developing several new molecular diagnostic assays.  Qiagen is also developing new biomarkers with the potential as companion diagnostics.  One of the company’s goals is to “expand NGS from research to routine clinical use.”  Qiagen is preparing the launch of its first NGS workflows in 2013, which includes a broad range of its products such as the QIAsymphony NGS version.  In closing, Schatz said the company will be “executing on its 2013 initiatives to drive growth and innovation at a faster pace.”