Biochemist Hopes Major Discoveries Await Young Firm
Paul Marangos gave up a top position at Gensia, one of San Diego’s most-promising biotechnology companies, to follow a dream.
“People think I’m crazy,” Marangos told The Times in May, 1991, describing his plan to create a small, start-up biotech company in San Diego.
A year and a half later, Marangos recalled that comment with a grimace. “ Crazy . . . seeing that (in print) makes me want to do it all the more.”
Marangos, now 45, has made considerable headway toward his dream. Cypros Pharmaceuticals, his San Diego-based company, is tackling the tough task of creating drugs that could help to prevent cell damage that occurs when blood flow is impaired by stroke, heart attack, head injuries and other potentially crippling medical conditions.
In many ways, Marangos, who moved to San Diego from the East Coast in 1978 to join Gensia, is typical of scores of researchers in San Diego’s growing biotech industry who start their own companies to take a good idea from the laboratory through to a product that will help reduce human suffering.
The tough economic decisions he has had to face have confronted other researchers who trade the relatively comfortable confines of the laboratory for the business world. Instead of worrying about test tubes and microscopes, they must deal with investment bankers and lease agreements.
There are signs that Marangos the researcher is making the transition to businessman.
Last month, Cypros completed an initial public stock offering that raised $6.4 million, enough to keep the small company afloat for about two years. The offering also includes planned stock sales down the line that potentially could raise millions in additional capital.
Next spring, Cypros’ 10 employees will move to a new building in Carlsbad from a cramped, sub-leased office in a Sorrento Valley industrial park.
And, key personnel are in place or on the way. Marangos, who serves as chairman and president, has enlisted Martin Nash, a biomedical executive who helped build other local biotech companies, to marshal Cypros’ limited financial resources.
Howard Jones, most recently vice president of chemistry at San Diego-based Amylin Pharmaceuticals, is vice president of drug development. A senior chemist has been recruited and will arrive in January.
Cypros reached an important strategic goal during the past year when it licensed the rights to patents for a handful of compounds that will be used as building blocks in the search for drugs to help prevent ischemia, the medical condition in which tissues and organs are damaged or destroyed because of impaired blood flow.
It was Marangos’ longtime interest in preventing damage caused by stroke that pushed the 1973 University of Rhode Island biochemistry graduate out of the research laboratory and into the rough-and-tumble business of building a biotechnology company.
Marangos said that he’d always had an interest in business: He first played the stock market as a teen-ager, buying a handful of AT&T; shares that promptly increased in value. But business took a second seat to science, and, after graduating in 1973, he spent 16 years as a research chemist, primarily at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md.
At the NIH, Marangos found intriguing research paths to follow. He published hundreds of scholarly research papers and he began to suspect that he’d one day retire from the NIH.
But in 1988, he eagerly pursued the opportunity to join Gensia, then a year-old, privately held biotech company, as senior directory of research.
Within months of moving to the West Coast, Marangos realized that he would be more comfortable running his own shop, one that would give him the freedom to chase the dream medication that could prevent the human suffering caused by stroke.
Leaving Gensia was a tough decision, Marangos said, if only because he had to forfeit stock valued at $250,000 and a six-figure income. At Cypros, he will receive $165,000 annually, according to federal Securities and Exchange Commission documents.
Marangos’ family also felt the turbulence generated by his mid-career change of direction.
“I had never gone through such an emotional back-and-forth,” his wife, Maia, said in 1991. “At first, it was like a great weight had been lifted off of his shoulder. He was euphoric at having finally quit and being on his own.”
That heady sensation was balanced against the recognition that the family had given up the steady income promised by the NIH and Gensia. In a 1991 interview, Marangos noted that the family fired the housekeeper and stopped taking vacations.
While there is still uncertainty, Marangos seems to be at home in the business world.
According to San Diegans who have witnessed his evolution, it’s obvious that Marangos has been bitten by the business bug.
Gensia hired Marangos to tap into his research expertise. But Marangos’ business acumen quickly became evident, said Dan Pegg, president of the San Diego Economic Development Corp., and a member of Gensia’s board of directors.
“He was recruited to Gensia because he was a very talented individual,” Pegg said. “But he quickly got a real strong taste of the entrepreneurial environment . . . and he’s doing a very impressive job so far in his own company.”
Marangos’ business card identifies him as chairman and president of Cypros, but the chairman’s suite at Cypros is anything but palatial. His sparsely decorated office is tucked into the back of a leased suite in a Sorrento Valley industrial park. Until Cypros moves to Carlsbad in the spring, the company’s laboratory space will be split between two sites in Sorrento Valley and La Jolla.
Cypros is assembling the building blocks that will be needed to develop a drug that will help to avert the damage done by stroke, traumatic head injury, and other conditions that are characterized by ischemia, or impaired blood flow.
The company is developing drugs that will help cells to maintain adenosine triphosophate (ATP) levels and control levels of lactic acid. ATP is the universal fuel for living cells, while lactic acid is a potentially deadly byproduct of metabolism.
Cypros’ initial name was Regentech, a word play on the regenerative nature of Marangos’ planned technology. But Regentech gave way to Neurotherapeutics when it became more apparent that the company was going to target cells in the brain.
But when it became apparent that the compounds under study had a potentially wider variety of therapeutic uses, Regentech was dropped in favor of Cypros, which stands for cytoprotection,or cell protection.
Marangos created Cypros largely to develop a specific compound that he helped to discover. But that compound will take second-seat to a handful of other compounds to which Cypros has acquired the patent rights.
Rights to those compounds were acquired because they hold the promise of halting the potentially deadly effect of ischemia--and have already been proven safe in humans. The compounds “are existing agents which have been used to treat humans safely for other diseases,” Jones said.
Marangos described that strategy of licensing technology developed by other researchers as “pragmatic and opportunistic.”
“I didn’t want to bet the success of this company on one product,” Marangos said. “It’s just like at the NIH . . . . I always had five or six research areas going at once.”
