October 2006 Growth Factor BioMimetic proves a Lynch-pin of Middle Tennessee’s biotech in more ways than one By Richard Daverman
In the last year, BioMimetic won the biotech version of the daily double. Last fall, the small Franklin-based biotech firm managed to shepherd its bone-regenerating product through the torturous approval requirements of the FDA, and this past spring, the company made its initial public offering.
The kicker? BioMimetic accomplished all this after a “short” six years of work and on a minimal budget of just $26 million, giving the company bragging rights and a license to write the book on frugal biotech entrepreneurship.
As a company, BioMimetic is located solidly in the hot nexus between biotech and medical devices. Its first product, GEM21S, combines a known growth factor (a biotech drug) with a synthetic scaffolding matrix (a medical device). The first use for the product is healing the bone loss resulting from periodontal disease. In the future, the company hopes to prove the product will help repair difficult fractures. Then, BioMimetic will move on to sports injuries—cartilage, tendon and ligament repair for weekend athletes.
To date, BioMimetic remains unprofitable, which means the stock price has been less than stellar. “Profitability will come with the second product,” assures president and CEO Dr. Sam Lynch, speaking of the orthopedic application that remains some years away. (Lynch has been involved with rhPDGF-BB, the growth factor drug, since his days at Harvard in the 1980s.)
Near term, the “clinical results on the orthopedic use of their product will drive the stock price,” says Jan Wald, an analyst with A.G. Edwards, who has a “speculative buy” rating on the company. “By the end of the year, they will have two articles in peer-reviewed journals and make several presentations at scientific conferences.”
That will make a prosperous financial future seem more imminent.
For the present, the successful BioMimetic IPO shows that biotech remains viable in Tennessee, and specifically in Middle Tennessee, which is not yet a byword for “biotech startups,” despite the area’s considerable prowess in health care. BioMimetic is the first Middle Tennessee biotech company to go public on a U.S. stock exchange. “It’s getting us real attention,” says Joe Rowling, executive director of the Tennessee Biotechnology Association.
To hasten Middle Tennessee’s biotech emergence, Lynch and his wife Dr. Leslie Wisner-Lynch, BioMimetic’s director of applied research, are pushing creation of a Middle Tennessee Technology Corridor, modeled after the successful Tennessee Valley Corridor in the eastern part of the state.
Wisner-Lynch was among the masterminds gathered recently in Huntsville, Ala., to discuss including that city into a regional partnership aimed at keeping researchers from institutions like Vanderbilt University and MTSU from leaving Tennessee to commercialize their research.
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