ProThera Biologics CEO discusses move to Jewelry District

PROVIDENCE – ProThera Biologics has moved into a Brown University building on Eddy Street that will put it in in the heart of an area dedicated to medical advances and research.
“The location of our new facility is ideal as it is in walking distance to our academic collaborators at Brown, Lifespan and Women & Infants Hospital,” Dr. Yow-Pim Lin, founder of ProThera Biologics, said this week.
The biopharmaceutical company, which until last month was in the former FujiFilms building on Massasoit Avenue in East Providence, was founded in 2002 by Lim and Douglas Hixson, researchers at Brown and at Lifespan, the largest health care system in Rhode Island. Hixson has since retired from Lifespan, but is still involved with ProThera, Lim said.
Lim described ProThera as a development stage company that is focusing on the therapeutic product and diagnostic blood test. They are exploring the commercial potential of inter-alpha inhibitor proteins for treating acute life-threatening inflammatory diseases.

According to Richard G. Horan, managing director of the Slater Technology Fund, which provided $100,000 in early-stage funding to the company, ProThera made “great progress” while operating in the FujiFilm building, and at one time, was considering an expansion of its manufacturing operation.
However, Horan said the company changed its focus at the end of 2014 to research and development.
Lim said he they are trying to forge a partnership with a company that can manufacture its product for human use. The new building is not suitable for manufacturing, Lim said.
“We moved our lab facility to anticipate our major milestone in product development toward human testing with our industrial partner. We anticipate to seek FDA approval in 12 to 18 months to test the safety of our therapeutic proteins in healthy volunteers and the efficacy of the product in acute systemic inflammation,” Lim wrote in an email.
The Slater-backed company has received research grants from the R.I. Science and Technology Advisory Council, as well as continuous funding from the National Institutes of Health with several phase I and II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants over the past 10 years, totaling $8 million to date, Lim said.
Said Horan, “They’ve done a great job of developing collaborations, particularly with dominant researchers in the local biomedical research community.” Rather than renew the arrangement with FujiFilm, Horan said the focus changed to finding a facility more strategically located.
“The jewelry district makes more sense for the company,” Horan said, calling it an “ideal location for a startup biopharma company like ProThera to interact with clinical collaborators.”

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