Ex-Icos workers go from ED to TB

As the gloom of expected massive job cuts settled on the Bothell campus of biotech company Icos last fall, employees racked their brains for an alternative to the unemployment line.

One group of medicinal chemists stumbled upon an idea that instead has them on the front lines of a global health crisis.

"The idea was to form a not-for-profit company to pull together and use first-rate drug-discovery capabilities that would be available after the closure of Icos," Dr. Edward Kesicki said in Seattle the other day.

"We approached Lilly with the idea, and there was a tremendous amount of interest."

Kesicki spoke at a news conference last Tuesday where executives from drug giant Eli Lilly — which finally acquired Icos for $2.1 billion in January and laid off nearly all 550 of its Washington employees — announced a plan to implement the idea.

Lilly says it will channel $15 million over five years toward a new public-private partnership, based in Seattle, for researching early-phase drug candidates to fight TB.

The bulk of the donation, $9 million, is in-kind contributions of high-speed drug-screening equipment, research tools and chemical libraries. Some of the equipment was sitting idle at Icos after Lilly closed the labs, Kesicki said.

"You don't have that kind of opportunity very much where you have equipment available, you have people available and you have interest in the community to do it. So it's sort of being opportunistic," he said.

Kesicki is now president of that not-for-profit the Icos employees envisioned last October. It's called Afya World Medicines and it is one of the partners in the new tuberculosis effort.

It's a big shift for Kesicki and other former employees of Icos, whose lead product was the blockbuster drug Cialis, used to treat the First World disease of erectile dysfunction.

"Many people go into science to try to make a difference, and a lot of these global diseases impact a lot of people, and it would be nice to work on those," Kesicki said. "But you realize right away that you probably won't get a chance to do that because the money is not there. And so now things come together, and here's a chance to do it, and many people would jump at that chance."

Dr. Bruce Carter, head of Seattle biotech ZymoGenetics and a board member of the Global Alliance for TB Drug Development, put it a bit more succinctly:

"I hope my friends from Lilly won't mind me saying so, but curing tuberculosis is somewhat more uplifting than an erectile-dysfunction drug."

— Benjamin J. Romano

Rami Grunbaum: rgrunbaum@seattletimes.com