Name: Eric Ostertag, M.D., Ph.D., Founder & CEO
Company: Transposagen Biopharmaceuticals Inc., a privately held biotechnology company dedicated to providing unique animal models of human diseases for drug discovery and development.
Education: I went to the University of Wisconsin for my bachelor's degree in genetics, and while I was there several of my genetics teachers had connections to the University of Pennsylvania. One of them made me promise to apply there, and that's where I did my graduate work (Ph.D., molecular biology), and ultimately, my medical degree and my post-medical training.
What the company does: Transposagen is a company that I founded while I was in medical school. It's based on some of the work that I did as a graduate student using a technology called mobile DNA, or what some people call "jumping genes," and others call junk DNA. It's a component of your genome that everybody has. It normally doesn't do anything, but sometimes acts like a copy machine and makes lots and lots of copies of itself. Sometimes those copies will go into another gene and that will cause a genetic mutation. In humans, this can be a bad thing because you could have a son or daughter to inherit a mutation that causes a disease; in fact, that is how it was actually discovered. We use those elements to harness power to make animals with natural mutations that then replicate human diseases. These animals are absolutely crucial for doing drug discovery to find new targets for drugs and for testing drugs that will ultimately be human therapeutics.
Our Market is: Our market is pharmaceutical companies that will be using the animals to try to screen for new targets. Pharmaceutical companies use the animals to test their compounds that they already have for specific diseases. Academic researchers who are very early in drug discovery phases also use them.
How the company got its name: Transposagen was a name that a group of us came up with when we were doing business planning many years ago for a related idea. A Transposan is a mobile DNA element. It's one sort of flavor of mobile DNA. A brilliant woman named Barbara McClintock who ultimately won the Nobel Prize for her discovery actually discovered Transposan.
Start-up history: The business was originally established in Philadelphia. It was in an incubator within walking distance of the University of Pennsylvania.
We discovered Lexington while looking for a new place to do business. We had no reason to be in Philadelphia anymore. We had expanded, so instead of just owning intellectual property that had just spun out from the University of Pennsylvania, we had intellectual property and collaborators from multiple universities across the country including Johns Hopkins in Minnesota, and the Medical College of Wisconsin. We were starting collaborations at UK.
We started looking for other places that would maybe offer better quality of life for myself and my employees and a cheaper cost of doing business. It just so happened that right at exactly that time Kentucky became the first state in the nation to match dollar for dollar a specific grant that we have from the National Institute of Health (NIH) called a SBIR Grant. And so that's what initially attracted us to Kentucky.
The company secured greater than $2.5 million in early stage funding from regional networks and the NIH.
Why Lexington is good for us: When I was looking at Lexington as a place to do business, one very important consideration was the university and the people coming out of that university. What kind of collaborations could I establish? What type of people could I hire? And that goes all the way from the technician level, graduate student, post opt level and even up into the more senior level positions.
I've been very impressed. I've met with Lee Todd, the president of the university, who has made a real effort to develop it into a very strong R & D (research and development) university that's top in the country. It already has one of the top pharmacy schools in the country and commercialization of that R & D is very important. It's not just 'let's be a top research university;' it's 'let's be that university and then take the next step and actually commercialize that and make important treatments and therapies for people.'
Why we're good for Lexington: The SBIR grant is a brilliant program for both the companies that receive it and for Kentucky. For a company like ours that is in very early stage research, our R & D is very expensive. These grants are one of a very few number of ways to get a company off the ground.
The problem with the grant itself though is that the money comes with certain limitations on how it can be spent. You can earmark some of the money for scientists, you can spend some of that money on research, a little bit of money on overhead costs but it's difficult to spend that money on things like business development. So the matching dollar program really fills that gap perfectly.
The first two things that we were able to spend that money on here were to hire two really excellent employees from Kentucky. We are also spending it on the development of the business and intellectual property. I think for the company it is absolutely crucial.
The company employs: We have four executive positions, three in Lexington. One researcher still in Philadelphia will be coming in January. We have a variety of technicians who do the research work.
Right now we also have a lot of research that's done at academic institutes around the country and part of that is because we currently do not have a vivarium to house our animal experiments. (A vivarium is a place, especially an indoor enclosure, for keeping and raising living animals and plants under natural conditions for observation or research.) We are in the process of looking at various sites in Kentucky to build a vivarium. We're also moving our wet labs (labs used for biology experiments), which are currently in Philadelphia, to the UK campus. That move should be completed by January.
What's new for us: On December 12, 2008, the company was approved for up to $325,000 in the form of a forgivable loan from the Kentucky High-Tech Investment Pool, administered by the Cabinet for Economic Development's Department of Commercialization and Innovation (DCI). The funding will be used to purchase laboratory equipment, fit up leased laboratory space, and obtain protection for the company's intellectual property.
DCI's award will enable Transposagen to grow well-paying biotech jobs in Lexington at a faster pace. We anticipate adding a minimum of 13 full-time, high-tech and technical support jobs at an average salary of approximately $57,500 by the end of 2012.
What I love about this job: I like the autonomy - - the ability to decide which way I'm headed and which way the research is headed. It is incredibly gratifying starting from scratch and building something. As one of my colleagues said, we're "making a dent in the universe." We can make a real difference in biomedical research.
The best advice I could give someone about this field
I think it's not for everyone. It's not easy, but it can be very rewarding. If you are an entrepreneurial type and willing to take enormous risks, the rewards can be great.
What I'm doing when not at the office: That implies that I'm sometimes not at the office. I work out with weights twice a week and I'm a runner. I also travel a great deal and like seeing museums. I've been seeing more of Kentucky. It has some spectacular museums even in small towns.