Article Excerpt:
TWST: Please begin with a brief historical sketch of the company and a picture of the things you are doing right now.Mr. Dickie: Liponex is a biopharmaceutical research company located in Ottawa, Canada. Our technology comes from the University of Ottawa Heart Institute. One of the researchers there, Dr. Dan Sparks, who is our Chief Scientist and Founder, made some discoveries in the area of HDL cholesterol, that is the good cholesterol which you want to raise, and got the company started with some angel investors in Ottawa in 2000. The company progressed relatively rapidly with a pretty small team in order to prove the concept that we had a compound that could raise your good cholesterol. We did that through animal trials and into three Phase I human trials that were all done here in Canada under the regulatory regime of Health Canada. During these trials, a total of 65 normal subjects showed that the product was safe and well tolerated and is efficacious in raising HDL cholesterol. That got enough excitement around our company so that last year we went directly from being financed by angel investors to an IPO on the Toronto Stock Exchange; we got a senior exchange listing under the symbol LPX. We raised $11.5 million and that's sufficient to carry us through our Phase II clinical trial program, the first of which is currently underway. It will be a major milestone for the company to have the results of that trial in Q1 2007.
TWST: What challenges might be ahead of you? What might you worry about?
Mr. Dickie: We are in a very hot area of biotech, HDL cholesterol. Raising the
good cholesterol is a very popular area right now, and we are playing with some
pretty big competitors. Pfizer has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on a
new HDL raising compound called torcetrapib and it is in Phase III trial, just
ahead of our compound. We believe, however, that ours has some advantages and if
we can demonstrate that in our Phase II program, we hope to have great interest
in partnering the product with Big Pharma. In terms of a go-forward strategy,
our business strategy clearly is to find a partner after we have some Phase II
data. This is because we are playing in the world's biggest healthcare market
here, this $30 billion plus market for cholesterol drugs, and to take a product
like that to market is a job for Big Pharma.
Tickers included in this excerpt: LPX:TSX
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