He wants to use biotech against Alzheimer's
By Billy Baker, Globe Correspondent | July 23, 2007
Orrie Friedman is 92 years old, and he'd like to make a billion bucks between now and the time his number is called. He figures he's got at least 10 years to do it.
"People in my family live forever," he says. "The old man didn't retire until he was 99, and lived to 104."
It's not as though Friedman needs the money. As one of the pioneers of biotechnology, he's already made -- and given away -- more money than he could spend in a couple of lifetimes. But that $1 billion would mean two things: his latest company had developed a viable treatment for Alzheimer's disease, which contributed to his brother's death three years ago; and he can fulfill his final dream to endow a biomedicine institute at Brandeis University in his name.
The plan hinges on a theory -- as yet unproven -- that a class of organic silica-based compounds has the potential to dissolve the build-up of amyloid plaques, little bundles of protein that have been found in the brains of Alzheimer's sufferers.
Friedman thinks a paper his company, Grand Pharma, has written on the subject, which has been published on line by the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, "will create excitement" over the next few months when it hits the print edition . And, with that excitement, he hopes to interest a deep-pocketed pharmaceutical company in developing a drug and providing a grand finale to his unlikely life. Not that he thinks he needs a final act. "Considering where I started from and where I wound up," he says, "life owes me nothing."
Where he started was Grenfell, Saskatchewan, a "tiny speck on the vast plains of western Canada," before his family moved to Winnipeg. His father was in the bootleg business, and Friedman spent his early life scratching out a meager existence, sometimes in the family business, other times as the right-hand man in a rough-and-tumble gang that "got into every hell you could imagine."
He managed to graduate from the University of Manitoba in 1935, despite being what he describes as a "crappy student," and had a short career as a professional poker player during the height of the Great Depression.
He eventually grew bored with Winnipeg, and hopped a cattle train to Montreal in search of his fortune. He barely made a living. At night, he would travel to McGill University to hang out with Leo Brickman, a Winnipeg friend who was a graduate student in chemistry. It was these visits that Friedman credits with inspiring the "first quirks of intellectual curiosity" in his life, and he decided he wanted to be a chemist. "So I went to the admissions office at McGill with my crappy academic record, not expecting to be admitted, and it turned out the guy knew my father."
Friedman struggled during his first year at McGill, was a star his second, and then was accepted to the graduate school, where he did a top-secret doctorate on RDX, an explosive that was being developed for use in World War II. This led to seven years of post-doc work at Harvard Medical School, where he was a major contributor to the development of the cancer drug Cytoxan. From there, he was recruited to become a chemistry professor at a new university in Waltham called Brandeis.
In 1961, Friedman left Brandeis to open a business aimed at developing latent cancer drugs. That company, Collaborative Research Inc., which began in a small Waltham lab with 20 employees, was a pioneer in the infant field of biotechnology and, later, was among the first to study the relationship between genes and disease.
"Orrie really is the founder of biotech," said Al Kildow, a retired biomedical consultant who has been following Friedman's work for years. "His company was the first biotech company -- though they didn't even call it biotech back then -- and he set up the model that all other biotech companies followed, with an elite scientific advisory board to advise the directions they should pursue."
Friedman retired from Collaborative Research in 1992, and, shortly thereafter, opened Grand Pharma (the name is a play on Grenfell), and began his Alzheimer's research.
Friedman, who describes himself as a "restless 92-year-old cocker," is not content to sit around his luxurious apartment and tell war stories. He skied until he was 85, at which time he took up painting. A dozen of his landscapes adorn the walls of the home on Fisher Hill in Brookline that he shares with his wife of 48 years, Laurel.
And then there's his philanthropy. He's given millions to Brandeis and the Israel Institute of Technology, and he just endowed a $1.5 million children's worship room at Temple Israel in Boston in memory of his daughter, Trudy, who died a decade ago of melanoma at age 35, six months after giving birth to twins. Using his money to help others, he says, is not a bad way to spend his final years.
"I can't take it with me, and it's the least I can do ," he said.
FACT SHEET
Hometown: Born in Grenfell, Saskatchewan; grew up in Winnipeg; lives in Brookline.
Family: Four children and four grandchildren.
On why his professional poker career came to an end: "They would feed us these corn beef sandwiches while we played, and I got a case of food poisoning that almost killed me. When I recovered, the fascination with amorality had passed."
On why he only rose to No. 2 in his childhood gang in Winnipeg: "I could beat up everyone except for the No. 1 guy."
© Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
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