In an eye-catching proposal, a biopharmaceutical start-up company says it hopes to employ about 500 high-paid workers in the county within four years.
The drugs that Lakewood-Amedex Inc. is developing and would manufacture here center on its core technologies of gene silencing systems and the treatment of bio-terrorism diseases, such as anthrax.
The start-up -- Lakewood has only four employees at the moment -- is being taken seriously by county officials because the company has been down this road before.
Two of the principals, Steve Parkinson and Paul DiTullio, launched a company 10 years ago in Boston. TransXenoGen attracted millions of dollars from investors, but lost millions as it failed to turn its science into commercially successful products. At one point, the company was reportedly worth $250 million.
The founders have long histories in the field: Parkinson, for instance, was a manager at PPL Therapeutics when that company famously cloned a sheep named Dolly in 1996.
"We've done it before; we're actually in the process of taking this company public like we did with TranXenoGen," Parkinson said.
This time, though, the founders have poured $8 million of their own money into securing 25 patents, with 44 patents pending. The company expects to start human clinical trials this year on both a drug to fight antibiotic-resistant bacteria and a toxin-neutralizing antibody. Swine flu and Hepatitis B treatments are expected to go to trial by next year, according to Lakewood's business plan.
Parkinson, 52, says Lakewood is close to reaching an agreement with unnamed local investors to provide $6 million in financing.
The company also is planning an initial public stock offering on the London AIM Exchange, which is the London Stock Exchange's market for smaller, growth stocks. Lakewood plans to raise $20 million from stock offerings during the next two years.
The company also is asking Sarasota County for help in buying and equipping its first headquarters, a 23,000-square-foot office building on University Parkway. Buying, revamping and equipping the building will cost $4.3 million.
The help, though, will not cost the county anything, because the company only needs to win county approval to tap into low-cost financing offered through the federal stimulus program for promising job-creating businesses.
Kathy Baylis, president of the Economic Development Corp. of Sarasota County, said she has met with Parkinson's group and was impressed that the principals had been involved previously in taking a company to the point of issuing stock publicly.
"When we talked with them we thought they certainly had a lot of savvy and they certainly had the capability to make these things happen," she said.
"This is one we're going to keep our eye on."
In applying for county approval, Parkinson delivered a lengthy business plan that suggests the company could have more than $1 billion in sales by the end of the decade. While that may sound far-fetched, Lakewood notes that the products it has already patented are aimed at treatment markets estimated to be a combined $50 billion a year.
In the short-term, though, the company says it will add 20 employees in the next year, and another 14 the year after that. When manufacturing starts, employment could jump to 500 within three to four years, the company's plan says.
"There sure was a lot of technical stuff in this," County Commissioner Shannon Staub said of the company's business plan. "I felt like I was in a science class."
She added, "If this works and it goes, it's going to be big."
An increasing number of diseases are resistant to antibiotics, which is where the company's gene silencing approach comes in.
"A lot of the diseases are caused by overproduction of proteins," Parkinson said. "We can actually turn those genes down or turn them down completely."
