Content Galleries
|
Spain's Biotech Revolution
Return to Spain
Joan Ballesteros had built up a successful biotechnology company
called Novasite Pharmaceuticals in San Diego. The company
took a known, validated technology—flow cytometry—which
evaluates blood samples, and fully automated the system. Suddenly,
a machine that could evaluate perhaps some dozens of handfed
samples a day was transformed into one that could handle
thousands, automatically.
Ballesteros saw a wealth of possibilities with the new
technology. He imagined how this could aid in the personalization
of medicine for leukemia patients: a doctor could put a patient’s
blood into the machine and check it against thousands of options
for fighting leukemia, drugs alone or in combination, in a variety
of strengths. And that, to him, was just the beginning.
To make the most out of his ideas, he knew he had to do
something that might surprise his research colleagues in the San
Diego area, considered one of the world centers of biotechnology.
He had to move back home to Spain.
“I turned to my investors and said, ‘We should be screening
known drugs on patient samples … They told me, ‘You will lose
our money,’” says Ballesteros. “If I’m wrong, and it doesn’t work,
they’ll lose money. If I’m right, and we’re successful, then we’ll
have so many lawsuits that we’ll lose money.”
The problem resides with the legal system in the U.S., says
Ballesteros, with a culture of easily bringing suits to trial. If a
private company were to sign agreements with hospital patients
to use their samples for research to help treat diseases, and
if that company makes money, the patients could sue for a
percentage of the profits.
Because of this, biotechnology companies in the U.S. do not
work with fresh patient samples; that falls to public institutions
such as the National Institutes of Health or public hospitals and
universities. “But there have even been cases where the NIH has
been sued,” says Ballesteros.
In Europe, he explains, if patients have been fully informed and
signed a consent form in accordance with all legal and ethical
principles (which are essentially the same as In the U.S.), the legal system won’t allow such a case to be brought to court. “A key
differentiating factor between the U.S. and Europe, particularly
Spain, is the access to fresh human samples,” he says.
Ballesteros left his first company in San Diego and brought
some of his team to Spain, where in 2007 he founded a new
company, Vivia Biotech, with his brother Andres.
Vivia Biotech is partnering with hospitals that have samples
of blood and bone marrow samples, and signed consent forms,
from leukemia patients. He says his system can test thousands
of combinations of the less than dozen approved leukemia drugs.
“We’re already seeing tremendous differences” in how different
patients’ cancers respond to different drug combinations, he
says. In theory, a doctor in the future would be able to send his
patient’s blood in to be tested, and he could get an answer back
in 24 hours about the patient’s best course of treatment.
“This is what doctors have been doing for years, one drug at a
time,” says Ballesteros. “We’re only altering the scale.” Ballesteros
hopes that this method will be validated within a year.
Ballesteros doesn’t stop there. He’s particularly excited
about the prospect of using this machine to discover new
cancer-fighting drugs from existing, approved drugs that treat
unrelated diseases.
Most researchers are investigating what genes or proteins
differ in cancer and trying to create molecules to kill cancer
that don’t kill healthy cells, says Ballesteros, “but we do exactly
the opposite. We say, let’s get all the drugs that don’t kill you.
And of those, let’s see if some of them kill cancer.” He ticks
off antibiotics, drugs for the flu, for headaches, for Parkinson’s.
So far, he says, “the data is amazing, much better than what
we had expected.”
“We’ve found ten very safe drugs that have the same efficacy in
killing cancer as the harmful chemotherapy drugs,” he says; but it
will take at least three to five years to go through the necessary
trials before any will be validated for cancer treatment.
|
Articles |
 |
Spain’s Biotech Revolution 2009
Spain’s biotechnology sector has grown dramatically, with nearly 700 companies contributing significantly to the Spanish economy. |
 |
Spain’s Biotech Revolution 2005
With new companies, new products, and new research centers, Spain has become a world-class contender in the biotech industry. |
Webcasts |
 |
Innovation and Technology
See how Spanish biotech companies are leading the way. |
| Select your language below to view video. |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
Lab to market
Biotech — from the idea stage to commercialization.
|
| Select your language below to view video. |
 |
 |
 |
|
Multimedia |
 |
Spain’s Biotech Slideshow
Please click here to view. |
|