Christine Waller had just finished breast-feeding her 11-month-old son on that day in May 2009 when she felt the lump. Waller was only 32, and with no family history of cancer, she believed it was benign.
But when the lump was unchanged after a week, she called her doctor. Her appointment was on a Monday, and the doctor ordered an ultrasound and a mammogram. Not wanting to needlessly worry anyone, Waller told only her husband, Shane.
The next day, after reviewing the ultrasound, the radiologist said the lump probably was a clogged milk duct or cyst.
“They sent me back to see my OB [obstetrician, Dr. Frank Breaux], with the report,” she says. “I opened it on the way back to his office, and read that it said ‘suspicious for malignancy.’ That’s pretty much when all of the fear kicked in.”
Waller gave the report to Breaux, who hugged her and said he’d send her the next day for a biopsy. She says the breast surgeon performed the biopsy in his office, but wouldn’t answer any questions. Shane Waller believes the surgeon knew right away.
When the phone rang on Thursday morning, Christine Waller was home with her son and 3-year-old daughter. They were about to leave for a picnic when the doctor delivered the news: The lump was indeed malignant.
“My world just caved in,” she says. “It’s like having the wind knocked out of you, or the ground taken out from underneath you. Everything stops. This doesn’t happen to you.”
Waller went from being constantly active with her children to dividing much of her time between her doctor’s office and her bed. She underwent six months of chemotherapy to shrink the tumor before surgery, and she took multiple medications. Her hair fell out within the first two or three weeks of the treatment.
“That’s probably one of the hardest things,” Waller says. “The first thing you think about when they tell you that you have to do chemo is the fact that you’re going to lose your hair. I never looked sick until then.”
Chemotherapy kills any rapidly dividing cells—cancerous or not—and its side effects include pain, diarrhea, constipation, mouth sores, hair loss, and nausea and vomiting.
But what if there were another way to treat cancer? What if the cancer could be killed without causing such collateral damage? And what if the next cancer-fighting breakthrough currently was under development in Baton Rouge?
“I like the idea of having some kind of treatment that would be more targeted to just the cancer, so you could cut down some of those side effects and other damage,” Waller says. “Who knows what damage has been done to my body long-term?”
She’d applaud a targeting alternative therapy, “as long as it’s effective.”
A New York state law forced William Hansel to retire from Cornell University at age 70. The animal physiology expert accepted a professorship with the LSU AgCenter in 1990.
During the early 1990s, he tried to develop an oral contraceptive for humans and animals. It worked on the test animals—at first.
“For a week, maybe two weeks, we thought we hit the jackpot,” Hansel says.
But the effect wore off quickly; to this day, he has no idea why.
In 1997, he attended a Polish Academy of Sciences conference where a speaker discussed doing work with hormone receptors found in cancer cells. Hansel realized his sterilization drug targeted the same sort of receptors. His ideas typically develop gradually, he says, but on that day he experienced a sudden flash of insight.
“It sort of all came together as I listened to this man talk about his receptors,” he says with a soft laugh. “I had worked with these receptors.”
Hansel wasn’t working in cancer research at the time, but the disease might have been in the back of his mind. Less than a year before the conference, his wife, Milbrey, a human ecologist, died of ovarian cancer, one of the 10 most common cancers among American women.
Milbrey was subjected to the usual chemotherapy gauntlet and took Taxol, which was new at the time. Her regimen seemed to work for about a year, until the cancer metastasized, spreading nests of malignant cells all over her body. At that point, nothing more could be done.
“It’s traumatic,” Hansel says. “One of her physicians talked to me about the need for better drugs. I think this had some influence on my work.”
Once he returned to Baton Rouge from the conference in Poland, Hansel embarked on a new direction with colleagues Fred Enright, Carola Leuschner and Martha Juban. While the science is complex, the basic goal is straightforward: create an effective drug that targets cancer cells while sparing healthy cells.
Over the course of several years, they tried thousands of compounds and went through thousands of lab mice. By 2007, their work had been snapped up by the founding investors of Esperance Pharmaceuticals.
Esperance Pharmaceuticals’ lead drug, dubbed EP-100, currently is in clinical testing on humans, and the company has three other compounds in the pipeline. CEO Hector Alila compares EP-100 to a “guided missile.”
“It seeks and destroys only those [cancer] cells without harming normal cells,” he says. “Chemotherapy’s like a scorched-earth approach. This is very targeted.”
LSU, Tulane University and Louisiana Economic Development recruited Joe Lovett from Massachusetts in 2004 to be managing partner of Louisiana Fund I. Lovett had run successful venture capital funds affiliated with Harvard University. His mission: find “exciting new stuff” primarily from universities, raise money and form companies. Esperance—the word means “hope” in French—is one of those companies.
“The universities [in Louisiana] hadn’t done much of this before,” Lovett says.
Lovett is Esperance’s chairman. He recruited Alila, an experienced biotech executive born in Kenya, from Philadelphia in 2007, shortly after acquiring the rights to the technology that Hansel’s team developed.
Most of the investment in Esperance comes from out of state. Research Corporation Technologies of Tucson, Ariz., which has a relationship with Lovett dating back 20 years, was an early investor. Aside from Louisiana Fund I, other investors include Themelios Ventures, Louisiana Technology Fund, and several individuals and institutions.
“I knew it would be a challenge [raising money], but we’re getting it done,” Lovett says. “This is not Boston, where you’re tripping over venture capitalists in the halls of Mass General.”
Esperance announced closing $8.1 million in new funding in August. Significantly, $4.5 million came from French pharmaceutical giant Sanofi. Alila’s prior relationships with company officials got him in the door, and landing their support is a major coup for an early-stage Baton Rouge firm.
A representative with Sanofi-aventis U.S., Sanofi’s New Jersey-based affiliate, did not respond to an interview request about how a deal with a startup company like Esperance fits into its big picture.
Typically, as patents run out on several big moneymakers, pharmaceutical companies have been looking beyond their in-house research and development divisions to outside firms that can add new medicines to their pipelines.
Sanofi’s financial support gives Esperance international credibility, Lovett and Alila say, and its expertise in guiding a new drug through the testing and approval processes will be invaluable.
“This is the third-largest pharmaceutical company in the world, and they’re looking for promising drug candidates,” Lovett says. “We’re really proud of this. I don’t know if this has happened before in Louisiana.”
Universities across the country are trying to act more like entrepreneurs. Private schools such as Stanford and Massachusetts Institute of Technology are known for spinning off companies; the University of Florida has made millions licensing the formula for Gatorade. Local officials and business leaders often complain that Louisiana universities are not the economic development engines that they could be.
Multiple LSU campus leaders who vowed to strengthen connections with the private sector have come and gone. Current flagship Chancellor Mike Martin and Pennington Biomedical Research Center Executive Director Steven Heymsfield say it’s a priority.
But business leaders often complain—sometimes in hushed tones and always off the record—that the real problem lies with the LSU System office. Ray Lamonica, the system’s chief counsel, who is a frequent target of critics, scoffs at the notion that he’s personally blocking agreements.
“People who don’t get what they want say LSU is hard to do business with,” he says. “That [attitude] preceded me, I can assure you.”
LSU has been burned by bad deals in the past. In recent years, the system has put in place a set of procedures meant to end the ad-hoc, unwritten agreements that were often made at the campus level.
Academia doesn’t move at the speed of business, which can be frustrating for outsiders. On the other side, businesspeople sometimes expect taxpayer-supported universities to give away their intellectual property for free, which would be both illegal and ridiculous.
“You have these people who say, ‘I want to help LSU. Give me the land. Let me build my building on it, and I’ll make all the money, and 50 years from now we’ll give you the building,'” Lamonica says. “I get those kinds of deals presented. Or I used to.”
Esperance, founded on technology developed at LSU, Pennington and the AgCenter, is proof that agreements with LSU System institutions can be accomplished. The company is backed by smart money and run by people who know what they’re doing, Lamonica says, which is more than can be said for some concepts that amount to little more than pipe dreams and news releases.
Lovett says Louisiana university researchers don’t have much experience founding companies. One big hit, however, would get everyone’s attention.
The potential market for an effective oncology drug is in the billions, and LSU would receive a 3% royalty along with other fees. All nine Esperance employees have equity in the company, so if one of the drugs becomes a hit, they stand to make quite a bit of money. And if that happens, Lovett expects local university scientists will start calling him, saying, “I’ve got better stuff than Hansel. When can I see you?”
Lovett says the University of Massachusetts System went from about $500,000 in annual royalties and milestone payments to about $85 million in two decades. The system recruited some hotshots, one of whom won a Nobel Prize. So rapid progress is possible, he says.
“There’s nothing that helps out like a success,” Lovett says. “Success begets success, and they haven’t had a lot of success here.”
Terry Jones, executive director of the Regional Innovation Organization, a project spearheaded by the Baton Rouge Area Chamber to foster collaboration, improve access to capital and help sell the Capital Region to outside companies and investors, says more university partnerships with the private sector are on the way. Lovett’s fund has nine active licenses with Louisiana universities—six from LSU, two from Louisiana Tech and one from Tulane—in its portfolio.
“The commercialization of technology is now something that’s on everyone’s radar,” Jones says.
The success of a company like Esperance would be more than a big win for the tiny local life sciences sector; it could change perceptions about Baton Rouge and the entire state.
“It’s a moonshot everyone across the world will take note of,” Jones says.
Click here to find out who’s who at Esperance Pharmaceuticals.
Juban, who worked with Hansel on the precursors of EP-100 during her 20 years at LSU, is now a senior scientist with Esperance.
“I was the one actually making the drug,” she says. “In fact, when they need a question answered about the prehistoric days, I’m the one they call.”
In California or Massachusetts, it’s not uncommon for academics to cross over into the private sector, but it’s rare in Louisiana. The atmosphere at Esperance is very different from academia, Juban says.
“There’s much more immediacy,” she says. “This is a startup company.”
Leuschner, a native of Hanover, Germany, left Pennington to join Esperance, where she’s the firm’s senior director of biology. On a recent afternoon in the lab at the Louisiana Emerging Technology Center, Leuschner and Juban were working with a high-performance liquid chromatography machine.
“I’m analyzing drug concentrations,” Juban says, pointing to a printout. “This single sharp peak shows that it’s very pure, and the size of the peak tells me how much is there.”
Esperance still has a long way to go before EP-100, or any of its other compounds, can be declared a success. Major companies often spend vast sums of money developing drugs that never pan out.
The first stage of clinical testing, to determine the maximum tolerable dose for humans, began in 2009 and is wrapping up. In the second phase, Esperance will learn more about the drug’s effectiveness. Phase three will involve testing on hundreds of patients.
Of the $20 million invested in Esperance, a bit more than half has been spent. The trials are starting with ovarian cancer, a disease without very effective treatments, though Alila says the drug could be effective against various other types, including breast, prostate, pancreatic and testicular. They will know if EP-100 works within three years at the most.
“Best-case scenario,” Alila says, “the drug works really well, which puts pressure on the FDA to make it available.”
It can cost as much as $500 million to $1 billion to develop a drug and bring it to market, a sum that obviously won’t be raised in Baton Rouge. The plan is to get one of Esperance’s compounds to a point where a major drug company wants to set up a licensing deal or even buy Esperance outright. Sanofi has a seat on the company’s board, so it has the inside track if it so desires.
Lovett says Esperance already has turned down a big-money deal that would have moved the company to California, and insists if someone decides to buy Esperance, it’s not a foregone conclusion they’ll move it out of Baton Rouge.
They might even expand the company locally, he says, if they decide the environment is suitable. Many of their concerns would be the same as those of any other knowledge-based business: How hard is it to work with the universities? What is the quality of life like in the region? Can it attract a quality workforce?
For now, Esperance is focused on building a local success story upon homegrown science and technology.
“It’s like a coming-out party for Louisiana and for Baton Rouge,” Lovett says. “For me and Hector, it’s kind of exciting. It’s new here.”
Race for the cure
Esperance doesn’t have The Cure for Cancer. Neither does Hansel. No one does, and perhaps no one ever will.
Cancer isn’t one disease; it’s a category of diseases characterized by rapid, abnormal cell growth. What works against one form might be useless against another.
“There is no single cure for cancer,” Hansel says. “They’re so different.”
What companies are in the Louisiana Fund I portfolio?
Anything’s possible, of course. Once the Human Genome Project concluded in 2003, there were hopes that gene therapy could identify the silver bullet, but that hasn’t happened.
Someday, many cancers might be thought of as chronic diseases that can’t necessarily be cured, but can be managed over a lifetime, much like diabetes. And cancers often are defeated with traditional methods, as countless survivors can attest.
Derrick Spell, a private-practice oncologist based at the Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center, says there are hundreds or even thousands of pharmaceutical companies, like Esperance, that are investigating targeted treatments. But there’s hope for defeating every cancer, even those once thought untreatable. Before 2005, there were no Food and Drug Administration-approved targeted therapies for kidney cancer, Spell says. Today, there are six.
“I try to have cautious optimism about any of them,” he says. “Until they are proven to work in a real, live patient, it’s hard to know. I try to not get too much hope built up about a drug until I know it’s been proven to work in a specific patient that has a specific cancer.”
Hansel, now a cancer researcher at Pennington, turned 93 on Sept. 16. He still comes to work every day, and his assistant Cathy Huey says he keeps her on her toes. His earlier work belongs to Esperance, and he stands to be rewarded handsomely if the company is successful.
Meanwhile, he’s working on two new projects. One involves combining curcumin, the principal component of the popular Indian spice turmeric, with a targeting mechanism somewhat similar to EP-100. Curcumin is said to have all sorts of curative properties, including creating a resistance to cancer.
Hansel also is studying ways to cut off the energy supply to cancer cells. There are two biochemical pathways by which cells metabolize glucose; perhaps cancer can be starved to death by blocking those pathways.
“He has always told me that he loves what he does and will do it for as long as he can,” Huey says.
It has been a little more than two years since Waller’s diagnosis. She has dealt with chemotherapy, radiation therapy, early menopause, two mastectomies and a hysterectomy. She’ll be on medication for five years, and she sees her oncologist every three months. Recent scans showed no signs of a malignant recurrence.
“It’s a fear you live with for the rest of your life,” she says.
Her children helped her get through the darkest days.
“I couldn’t just lie in bed and feel sorry for myself,” Waller says. “I had to be up and healthy and smiling for them. They were just so sweet. They were everything I was fighting for.”
