WisBusiness: Fitchburg start-up aims to halt advance of Alzheimer’s

By Brian E. Clark
WisBusiness.com

MADISON – A research breakthrough lauded by Gov. Jim Doyle in his State of the State speech has spawned a Fitchburg company that hopes to stop Alzheimer’s disease in its tracks.

Speaking before the Legislature in January, Doyle praised Jeff Johnson, an associate professor in the Pharmaceutical Sciences Division at UW-Madison. Doyle also has asked for $1.5 million annually to fund Alzheimer’s research as part of the planned Institute for Discovery on the Madison campus.

Johnson lead a team that discovered a protein – transthyretin – that appears to halt the advance of neurological ailments such as Huntington’s, Parkinson’s, Lou Gehrig’s and Alzheimer’s.

The next step, Johnson said Tuesday at a Wisconsin Innovation Network (WIN) luncheon, is turning the discovery into a pill that is safe for humans. The process could take years and cost millions.

To do that, Johnson and Trevor Twose – former CEO of Scarab Genomics – recently founded Mithridion, Inc. The company is in its infancy and is currently operating out of Twose’s rural Fitchburg home.

With the aid of so-called “Angel investors” and other funding, Twose said he hopes to soon have the company on its way to creating and testing drugs that could be on the market in less than a decade.

The economic and social impact could be huge, he said. Billions of dollars are spent annually to treat Alzheimer’s alone. It afflicts 5 million Americans, including 110,000 Wisconsin residents. Those numbers will surely increase as baby boomers age.

Twose said drugs now being used to treat Alzheimers are only palliative, which means they relieve symptoms but do little treat the underlying condition. Johnson’s research could lead to drugs that could stop or even prevent Alzheimer’s.

Johnson, who will continue to run his lab at UW-Madison, said he was pleased that his research has produced a Wisconsin company.

He said when he and his fellow researchers made their breakthrough, published in the September issue of “The Journal of Neuroscience,” the big question was “what do we do now?”

Rather than turn the discovery over to a major drug company far away from the Badger State, he decided to work with Twose and form Mithridion.

Twose said Mithridion is negotiating a licensing agreement with the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), which has filed a U.S. patent application on behalf of the School of Pharmacy.

At the WIN luncheon, Johnson detailed the studies he and lead researcher Thor Stein did in their lab. Stein will become Mithridion’s chief scientific officer.

With further research, Johnson and Twose said they foresee a time when family members with a genetic predisposition to Alzheimer’s could take a drug to increase the transthyretin protein and prevent the disease from developing.

“I believe there will be drugs that cross the blood-brain barrier that can be used for Alzheimer’s therapy,” Johnson said in response to a question. “We’ll find them.”

For more information on Mithridion, call (608) 332-8319 or email Twose at trevor_twose@compuserve.com.