Technology-based companies such as Nektar and its soon-to-be competitor in the inhalable insulin market, Alkermes of Cambridge, Massachusetts, built their businesses on a biological concept. “By realizing that the lung is permeable to these large molecules, what we pioneered is a platform biology,” explains says John Patton, Nektar's cofounder and chief scientific officer. “When we started, we proclaimed that this [technology] was going to enable a lot of products.” Patton, left Genentech to co-found Nektar's earlier incarnation, Inhale Therapeutics, in 1990 and the company began testing drugs that could be administered by inhalation.
“We must have had 50 feasibility studies,” Patton says. Many candidates fell by the wayside, often for largely political reasons, such as a change in priorities at companies that owned the drugs Inhale was investigating. Other candidates that showed strong potential as inhalables, such as Amgen's Epogen (erythropoietin), were dropped because the companies who held the patent were not willing to collaborate. “We knew that Amgen had two great products that could be aerosolized, but they were not at all interested because they didn't want to share the revenue.” Other potential partners feared that safety issues would kill the product down the line. The partnership with Pfizer for insulin inhalation stuck, however, and soon emerged as the Nektar's main inhalable program.
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