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President of the Hepatitis B Foundation, and professor at Drexel College of Medicine, Dr. Tim Block (left) talks with Foundation fellow Jason Lamontagne of Kintnersville as he looks through a microscope at Delaware Valley College.
BY JOHN WILEN
THE INTELLIGENCER
April 30, 2006
It’s hard to tell as you pass the appliance repair shops and realty offices on nearby 202, but the seeds of a local biotech industry are being sewn just off the busy thoroughfare on the campus of Delaware Valley College.
It’s not the college itself that’s seeding the industry, but a group of college tenants that are just a few months away from moving to their own building in Buckingham.
The tenant, the Hepatitis B Foundation and the Institute for Hepatitis and Virus Research, are both headed by Dr. Tim Block, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Drexel University's College of Medicine. He's also director of Drexel's Institute for Biotechnology and Virology Research, also located on DVC's campus.
Block was the driving force behind the formation of all three groups. He's guided the Hepatitis B Foundation's growth over the past decade and a half from an outreach and advocacy group, consisting of four people, to a nexus of biotechnology research that has as many as 55 people, mostly researchers, working for either the foundation or the research institute.
In recent years, Block was the spark that raised money to build a Bucks County Biotechnology Center. Once envisioned for DVC's campus, the center is now being built in the existing D.A. Lewis industrial building on Old Easton Road.
"He always amazes me that he comes up with new ideas" says RoseAnn Rosenthal, director of West Philadelphia's Ben Franklin Technology Center. "He's really created a little hub up there, clustered around biotechnology. ... But for his efforts, it wouldn't be happening."
The Hepatitis B Foundation was started 16 years ago by Block, his wife, Joan, and two friends, Janine and Paul Witte. The four were impacted by what they will only call a "touching personal story" of hepatitis B, a viral disease that can cause liver disease or liver cancer.
At the time, Block says, little was known about hepatitis B, which afflicts 400 million, of which 140 million will die from its effects.
"Those were the dark ages," Block said. "I decided well, we're going to do something about this."
Block, a professor at Thomas Jefferson University at the time, envisioned a "moon shot" or Manhattan-project style plan to cure hepatitis B. But, he recalls, "Initially, we didn't have enough money to do anything for the foundation."
The founders quickly realized they couldn't solve hepatitis B just by talking.
Block met with the then president of DVC and proposed an on-campus research center.
"I said you build me a building we’ll put a little mini-NIH (National Institutes of Health) right here" Block said.
He was surprised to hear back from the president one day later. DVC built the 14,000-square foot Thomas Jefferson building, which is leased by the foundation, the institute and Drexel.
A quick look at Block's bio should explain why DVC was willing to take such a big chance on him. At age 14, Block enrolled in the State University of New York to study physics. As a sabbatical fellow at Oxford University, Block, Nobel Laureate Baruch Blumberg and Royal Society member Raymond Dweck discovered a mechanism in the transmission of hepatitis B that is being developed into a possible treatment for the disease. Block has made or worked on teams that have made other significant discoveries.
The foundation and institute have been a smashing success. Several companies have been founded on technologies developed at the institute.
"I put this group together to make drugs" Block says. "We're not just studying how many toes does a woodchuck have."
For instance, scientists from Callisto Pharmaceuticals have made Foundation and Institute labs their home for research on the company's liver cancer drugs. And Nucleonics, a Horsham company working on "silencing" genes that could cause disease got its start at the Hepatitis B Foundation.
"Nucleonics ... was founded by two scientists from here." Block said.
Block says Nucleonics itself has $100 million in market value, well justifying the investments that the foundation and institute have made.
The foundation and institute raise their money from the public and from government grants. Their consolidated annual budget is about $5.5 million. Block lives off his income from Drexel. He takes no pay from either the foundation or institute.
To date the foundation and institute themselves have not received much back from their investments. Many similar nonprofit research groups license or sell their technologies to the companies they spin off. The foundation and institute have not done so, yet.
"I think that is a flaw in our design," Block said.
In the future Block plans to be more aggressive when the groups spin out technologies, for instance hiring a professional negotiator to ensure the foundation and institute retain some value from their inventions in order to fund future research.
While the foundation and institute's relationship with DVC is basically that of tenant and landlord, DVC students regularly use their labs.
Now, Block is aiming higher. With the help of a $7.9 million state grant, the foundation and institute bought and are renovating the old D.A. Lewis building in Buckingham. When it's done late this summer, the 62,000-square foot facility will be a $15 million, state-of-the-art biotech building. It will be the new home of the foundation and institute, but will also serve as a biotech startup company incubator. Existing biotech companies are also expected to use its labs.
The idea is to further spur the development of a home-grown biotech industry.
"Right here, currently at DVC, soon in its own building ... is a major research organization that is emerging as a center for biotechnology," Block says.
The region is already the center of a booming biotech and pharmaceutical industry, ranging from Philadelphia to northern New Jersey.
"Companies here want to be close to the pharmaceutical companies because that's who their partners are going to be" said Rosenthal.
There's a deep pool of biotech and pharmaceutical industry talent in the area, and there are networks of researchers and financiers for emerging companies, experts say.
"I don't think people realize the wealth of resources in the Philadelphia region," said Karla Beckner White, spokeswoman for Pennsylvania BIO, a trade group.
Despite the names of the foundation and institute, research at biotech center won't be strictly limited to hepatitis B or viral infections. However, Blocks says only companies performing "compatible" research will be allowed to locate there.
Says Block: "We’re trying to build a scientific discovery campus.”
John Wilen can be reached at 215-957-8167 or jwilen@phillyBurbs.com
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