Fintan Walton:
Hello and welcome to PharmaTelevision News Review here at Bio-Europe in Milan, in Spring 2011. On this show I have Clifford Stocks, who is the Chief Business Officer at Calistoga Pharmaceuticals, welcome to the show.
Clifford Stocks:
Very well, Calistoga Pharmaceuticals is a collection of high skilled motivated individuals who are able to create a nice platform and a very good lead compound it ultimately lead to an acquisition of Calistoga Pharmaceuticals by the Gilead which was a nice outcome for investors and for patients. Let me tell you little bit about the origins of the Calistoga, so I was the Head of Business Development for ICOS Corporation for 15-years. ICOS was the originator of Cialis and developed that drug through a joint venture with Eli Lilly and company and commercialized Cialis and ultimately because of the success we had with Cialis we were acquired by Lilly in 2007. ICOS, and characterized, and cloned, and patented the delta isoform of PI3K with the specific intention of developing those compounds for information indications. And that program was not being funded at ICOS and up through starting in 2005 because the commercialization of Cialis was taking most of the funds we've stack ranked our portfolio determined which programs we would work on and which were still interesting but just could not be funded and so that was put in my hands to monetize I was the Vice President of Business Development at ICOS and we monetized it through a spin out or through a license structure of license the entire program the PI3K program from ICOS to a venture backed company called Calistoga, we did that with a contingent license we made it the contingency based on the venture company raising $20 million, so Jamie Topper who was is one of the partners at Frazier Venture Healthcare led those efforts to build the syndicate and they raised $26 million and they were able to license the program from ICOS to Calistoga. Mike Gallatin, who led the efforts at ICOS he was the Chief Scientific Officer of ICOS had left ICOS about a year prior to the acquisition of ICOS and Mike was a venture partner at Frazier Venture so was very familiar with the program knew its potential and was then the founder, the key founder of Calistoga. He recruited two other founders to help him in the money raising and the building of the company those individuals were Neil Giese, Neil is a PhD Cancer Scientist and Roger Ulrich, who is a development person and Roger has a long history in the pharmaceutical arena. So the three of them as founders raised the money, built the company, started hiring people they started with a small team of around 10 people and sorted through the compounds that they had licensed from ICOS determined which of those would be moved forward toward inflammation, which would be moved forward toward solid tumors and which would be moved forward toward hematologic malignancies. And the compound in hematologic malignancies is called CAL101 it was pushed first into the clinic and after conducting a Phase I the team did a Phase I study in normal's to establish a nice tolerability profile for the compound and then took it into a Phase I in patients, and the very first patient they dosed had a PR so that was a very exciting time for the company it was on around that time of course I was staying in touch with my friend Mike Gallatin on around that time of their first patient dosing that I circled back and started thinking about how I might work with the team there at Calistoga, in the midst of that the venture backers who consisted of Frazier Venture Partners, Alta Ventures, Amgen Ventures and Three Arch Ventures wanted to get a CEO and they recruited a very terrific CEO Carol Gallagher, Carol is a Pharm. D., with a strong scientific background that she has a much stronger commercial orientation having gotten good training at Amgen, Lilly and through the Pfizeroncology group. Carol also run Rituxan when it was around a billon dollars and grew it to several billions before she left Biogen Idec and she was part of the Genentech, Roche, Biogen Idec, relationship with the Idec, relationship that ran Rituxan, so Carol had a very strong commercial background in hematologic malignancies and with her vision could see how we were gonna take CAL101 forward for commercial success and we were on that track before we were acquired.
Fintan Walton:
It's an amazing story, because clearly what was what's important from what you just said there was one that you had to have the science, the science was obviously came from you know talented individuals, but what seems to be important was the assembly of the team with different backgrounds, different strengths that can take that platform basically and move it forward?