Seven years ago, researchers Bruce Weintraub and Mariusz Szkudlinski were at the National Institutes of Health developing a protein technology that had wide potential to treat illness.
Today, Weintraub and Szkudlinski are executives at Trophogen, a small startup about to gain a license from NIH to develop and market the very same technology.
          The technology transfer process has proven slow, cumbersome and sometimes frustrating to the scientists. In fact, they were almost forced to watch their years of hard work get snatched up by a large foreign pharmaceutical firm.
           NIH was prepared to license the technology to Organon, a large pharma based in the Netherlands, until Trophogen submitted a counterproposal after NIH issued notice of its intent in the Federal Register last May.
"We sent [Organon] a notification letter," says Marlene Shinn, technology licensing specialist at NIH. "And based on their lack of response, we're ready to go forward with Trophogen and negotiate a license with them."
Shinn says NIH at the end of March will place another notice of its intent in the Federal Register, this time listing Trophogen as the targeted licensee.
              Trophogen executives are confident that this time around, the license will be awarded to them.
"It still has to be finalized, but things are progressing well," says Weintraub, Trophogen's chief scientific officer. "It's very exciting for a company like us to be well on our way to developing exciting therapeutics."
Industry followers say it often takes years for small companies to get licenses from NIH and other large institutions.
"Small companies are at a disadvantage because often times, these negotiations can be quite lengthy and time-consuming," says Christine Ross, CEO and founder of consulting firm New Organon Group, which is not related to the Netherlands company. "I think large corporations can wage a war of attrition against smaller companies when it comes to technology transfer."
Shinn says negotiating with Trophogen is more consistent with NIH's preference to work with small businesses.
           "They are familiar with the technology, and we feel they can develop it further," Shinn says of Trophogen. "I'm thinking at this point, we had given them [Organon] the opportunity to state their case, and they never came forward with information."
Organon operates in more than 100 countries and has approximately 10,000 employees worldwide. Its U.S. operations are in West Orange, N.J.
        By comparison, Trophogen has eight employees and operates solely out of its Rockville headquarters, which comprises about 10,000 square feet of laboratory and administration space.
Toucan Capital in Bethesda urged Weintraub and Szkudlinski to form the company and pursue marketing the technology on their own. The venture capital firm invested $3.5 million in Trophogen last summer.
Linda Powers, managing director of Toucan Capital, worked diligently with Trophogen to present its case to NIH.
        "This is no ordinary startup company, and that was what we had to explain to them," Powers says.
Gaining the platform technology license would be a sweet victory for Trophogen, which plans first to develop drugs to battle infertility -- a $5 billion market worldwide, Weintraub says.
        The platform technology develops more active and useful forms of recombinant protein hormones and related growth factors. Scientists call such active proteins "cystine knot growth factors." Simply put, the technology involves substituting conventional amino acids in a protein with more "active" amino acids, which creates a more effective drug.
The potential for the technology is large -- there are more than 100 members of the cystine knot growth factors.