Biotech Values

[DewDiligence]

Remember Esperion? PFE bought them for
big money but doesn’t want them anymore.

http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2008/05/01/for-lipitor-king-its-deja-vu-all-over-again

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Déjà Vu for Lipitor King

by Ron Winslow
1-May-2008

Four years ago, Roger Newton was the envy of the pharmaceutical industry when Pfizer bought his startup biotech Esperion Therapeutics and a handful of experimental compounds that raised good cholesterol for a cool $1.3 billion.

Little came of the venture for Pfizer, which shut the operation down last year amid a broader restructuring. But today Pfizer said it’s disgorging Esperion, which is relaunching as a private company with $22.8 million in venture financing and none other than Newton at the helm.

“It’s like the phoenix rising,” Newton tells the Health Blog, though he deliberately stopped short of adding ‘from the ashes.’ The company has one drug candidate from “Esperion 1,” he says, with plans to develop a portfolio of HDL-related compounds.

During the 1980s at what used to be Warner-Lambert, Newton was co-inventor of the molecule that became Lipitor, the industry’s largest selling drug. By the time Pfizer bought Warner-Lambert in 2000, Newton and his iconic status had already moved on to Esperion 1 to develop a drug known as ApoA-1 Milano, an HDL-raising compound developed from the finding that a genetic anomaly that protected residents of a remote Italian village against heart disease.

A 47-patient study showing that five weekly infusions of the drug actually shrank heart-attack-causing plaques in the coronary arteries drew Pfizer’s blowout bid. But in the end, Esperion became part of the pharma giant’s thus far disastrous excursion into the HDL world–most clearly reflected in the failure of the drug known as torcetrapib.

“The science of HDL is new,” Newton says. “There’s a lot more to be learned and with those learnings come the opportunity to find new targets” and new drugs.

Financing for Esperion 2 was led by Aisling Capital, Alta Partners and Domain Associations and included participation by Arboretum Ventures. Pfizer too has an equity position, but further details aren’t being disclosed.

Newton says discussions for the divestment began about the time the operation — at Pfizer’s now defunct Ann Arbor campus — was closed. “I was the last guy in the building, except for the guard,” he says.

Now he and about eight other researchers are back in the building to start again. To the Health Blog, that sounds pretty close to rising from the ashes. If he builds Esperion into a company that Pfizer wants to buy again for $1.3 billion, that would be the ultimate deja vu all over again.
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