dbeard@dominionpost.com
MORGANTOWN – GATC West Virginia is making progress in medical innovation at its headquarters in the WVU Innovation Corp.
Their lab is up and running and they’re hiring, Chief Business Officer Ty Lam told us during a visit to their offices.
First, some background. As we reported in August, GATC is innovating in two big ways. One, it’s streamlining the creation of pharmaceuticals using it artificial intelligence Multiomics Advanced Technology (MAT) platform.
And two, they’ve partnered with Medical and Commercial International (MCI) – an insurance underwriter based in London and a syndicate of Lloyd’s of London – to create clinical trial insurance coverage. This means that instead of a biotech entrepreneur having to sell off its equity to acquire the vast funds to move forward, it can take a loan, and the lender will be protected from failure by the insurance.
Back ot the present. “We’ve actually got a live working lab,” Lam said. Their offices are in the office wing of the WVUIC complex, and the lab is located in part of the former Mylan factory building.
Their first lead chemist, Alexa Martin, is now synthesizing compounds in the lab. She was in the office during our visit and told a little bit of her story. She completed her undergrad at Pitt and earned her doctorate in synthetic organic chemistry at WVU in 2022.
With no local opportunities for work, she sought more training at Emory University in Georgia. But when she learned about California-based GATC Health hiring for its Morgantown operation, she inquired and got hired.
“I was so happy to come home,” she said. And Lam added, “We are beyond happy to have her.”
Their second lead chemist, head of GATC’s Chemical Research and Development at their Washington site, will be moving frm Tacoma to Morgantown early next year, Lam said. And they have an offer out to a third. Then they will build a team under those three.
“We’re bringing people to West Virginia,” Lam said.
We talked about GATC’s work using AI to develop drugs faster and more reliably.
As we reported in August, drug development costs run from $160 billion to $200 billion per year. It may cost $1 billion or more to get a single drug through the 10-12 year FDA approval process, and 95% of them fail.
Drug developers will consider particular cellular targets to address a disease cause and then create compounds – molecules – to bind with the target cells. That takes four to six years. They then synthesize the compound for pre-clinical cellular testing, then animal testing, then human testing.
An early stage biotech company might spend tens of millions on pre-clinical trials, then need hundreds of millions more for clinical trials. Only 40-50 new drugs survive the process each year.
GATC’s MAT platform takes that initial four- to six-year process and reduces it to 18 months, and they’re looking to reduce it to 12 months. And these AI-crafted compounds will have a greater likelihood of surviving the pre-clinical (generally animal) and clinical (human) trials for FDA approval. They want to improve the 5-10% success rate to 90%.
“All the work that’s being done here has a much greater likelihood of making it through the cycle,” Lam said.
Another GATC advance is synthesizing their own cells for the in-vitro phase of pre-clinical testing. Before a drug is tested in an animal, it’s first tested in vitro – checking for effects, and dangerous side effects, in cells.
They had been outsourcing that work to a firm in India, which takes a long time. “We said we should be doing this ourselves,” Lam said. “We’re now building the cell ourselves. … We’re taking on lot of this pre-clinical work ourselves, not because we planned on it but because it makes the results of our AI platform come to fruition faster and with better results.”
Martin pointed out another important advantage. The AI platform is built on human data, not on data from rats and mice and rabbits and other lab animals.
They said one of the reasons cliical trials can fail is because animal-based results don’t translate to humans. So human-based AI modeling offers better results.
We said in August that Lam is a Virginia native and had his eye on West Virginia for GATC, for various reasons. One, space at the Innovation Corp. offered GATC the opportunity to consolidate lab operations in Morgantown.
In March, the state Economic Development Authority and the Jobs Investment Trust approved a $5 million investment into GATC West Virginia to bring jobs here and advance its work. The company received its first $2 million and will receive an additional $1 million for each 10 people it hires, Lam said.
Now, he said, GATC is working closely with WVU and Marshall on their drug-development research to help them transition it to the pre-clinical phase. “We now have the opportunity to partner even further with the university. It’s becoming a really symbiotic relationship.”
GATC has its first drug invention awaiting FDA trials, Lam said. It’s a potential breakthrough treatment for opioid use disorder. Another one, for PTSD treatment, is in the pipeline.
