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Scottsdale biotech firm will unveil its first drug
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A Scottsdale biotechnology company will present its first drug, meant to fight lymphoma, at a world conference on Tuesday.
InNexus Biotechnology, housed at the Mayo Clinic research campus, has been working for the last nine months to ready the drug for pre-clinical testing, said CEO Jeff Morhet.
“This is after years of science we’ve done,” he said. “And we do it as rapidly and efficiently as we can.”
Morhet will make a presentation Tuesday at the 12th annual Drug Discovery and Development of Innovative Therapeutics World Conference in Boston.
“They’ll want to know how the science actually works. How we invented it. How does the company function and who are the folks on our leadership team,” Morhet said. “We are going to be grilled by our peers.”
The drug is meant to fight lymphoma, a cancer of the blood that occurs when white blood cells change and multiply, crowding out healthy cells, according to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.
Those cells then create tumors that enlarge the lymph nodes and other parts of the immune system.
More than 70,000 people in the U.S. will be diagnosed with lymphoma this year, the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society reports.
The new drug capitalizes on InNexus DXL Technology, which enhances antibodies, proteins that fight infections and diseases.
The technology links antibodies, making them more potent and accelerating the process for bad cells to die.
“We want to send cancer cells into the suicide state,” Morhet said.
It will take about two years before the drug is ready for human trials, Morhet said.
InNexus opened its Scottsdale labs in 2006.
Since then, it has hired about 20 people, including a new chief medical officer, Dr. Jur Strobos, former director of policy and research for the Food and Drug Administration.
InNexus also recently hired Dr. Thomas Kindt, an immunologist formerly of the National Institutes of Health, as its chief scientific officer.
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