Ep. 262, Chapter 3: Early Ventures In Biotech With Roger Cone, Ph.D.

18:40 – 26:47

Dr. Cone founded two biotech companies prior to Courage Therapeutics: Northwest Neurologic and Xenomics. He credits those companies’ successes to partners who handled the business and financial aspects, allowing him to focus on the scientific side.

Northwest Neurologic aimed to leverage new technologies for cloning G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) to improve drug discovery. Northwest Neurologic secured contracts with pharmaceutical companies and contributed data used for the FDA approval of venlafaxine. The company was eventually acquired by Neurocrine Biosciences.

Xenomics was created to use the zebrafish as a genetic model for discovering new drug targets. The company built a library of mutations for every gene in the zebrafish genome. Although Xenomics raised significant funding and showed great promise, it was forced to liquidate during the 2008 financial crisis. Dr. Cone believes this was likely the best outcome, as advancements in genome sequencing technology would have eventually made the company’s core technology less valuable.