AesRx Navigates "Valley of Death" to Get Sickle Cell Drug Into Trials
Summary
To biotech observers, this may not have seemed like a big deal—sickle cell is a rare disease that affects only about 75,000 people in the U.S.—but for AesRx CEO Stephen Seiler, just getting this far is a major achievement.So Seiler, who bought the drug from a New Jersey company that had gone bankrupt, nurtured its early development with about $1.5 million in angel funding, money from his own pocket, and a $750,000 loan from the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center.Then, in November 2010, AesRx (pronounced ES-er-ex) formed a partnership with the National Institutes of Health, which committed an undisclosed amount of money to help advance the drug through pre-clinical studies and the first human trials.“It was a huge step towards getting us through the Valley of Death,” says Seiler, quoting terminology that CEOs often use to describe the chronic lack of venture funding for early-stage biotechs.Sickle cell disease is an unpopular target for drugmakers because the FDA has traditionally set too high a bar for the endpoints they must prove in clinical trials, Seiler says.