Links: Pharma’s middle class, IndyHall gaming and more

DEFINITE READS

• Mike Armstrong of the Inquirer writes about the region’s pharmaceutical ‘middle class,’ with between $1 billion and $10 billion in annual sales.

MIGHT BE OF INTEREST

• Keystone Edge has a Q&A with Drew Becher, the new chief of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, discussing his interest in sustainability and technology in the nonprofit’s mission.

Below, a middle-class pharma company gets a little bigger, a 30 Under 30 nod for an e-mail marketer and more.

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Friday Q&A: Pennsylvania Bio President Mickey Flynn

Mickey Flynn wants to talk about entrepreneurship.

In an industry and a region dominated by major players and corporate standbys, the president of Pennsylvania Bio, a statewide trade association for the biosciences with headquarters in Malvern, seems to brighten when startup talk comes to the fore.

He’s gone that route himself. Before taking the chief seat with PA Bio four years ago, Flynn, 68, grew tiny Puresyn, which develops purification services for gene-based drugs and vaccines, from three employees to 25.

But he’s no outsider to PA Bio, rather, he’s a steady hand in the region’s bioscience scene. He was a founding board chairman of the group 20 years ago and, all told, he has just shy of four decades in the industry.

Now, the resident of Downingtown is recovering from his group’s Biotech 2009 Symposium, which drew last month to the Convention Center more than 900 attendees, better than double what it did when he first became president and the largest in its nine years of existence.

Below, Flynn gives us a recap of the conference, handicaps the region’s bioscience-entrepreneurship ecosystem and explains why Mickey isn’t really his name but you ought not call him anything else.

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Shop Talk: Interphase Systems CEO John Biglin on Ready-IT BioPharma

A year ago, John Biglin, the CEO of Interphase Systems, was talking to the CFO of an emerging Center City pharmaceutical company.

The CFO, intent on keeping in order the financial house of his blue-chip invested life sciences startup, had a problem.

“Is it normal that sometimes you don’t get e-mails, or e-mails take a couple days to arrive or when you do get them, they come in triplicate?” Biglin remembers the CFO asking.

John Biglin

“Our IT has been cobbled together by an employee or by his nephew or uncle,” Biglin recalls the CFO and others in his position saying. “Someone just shows up in a truck and sets stuff up in our office. If the FDA came in here and we say we can’t produce this lab data or that, we are out of business.”

The CFO talked about multiple versions of contracts lost, emergency Best Buy trips for whatever hardware is on sale and documents that are never seen again.

That conversation last January set into motion the long-discussed plans for Interphase, which does 60 percent of its business in the life sciences, to develop a turn-key, managed IT platform targeted for small and medium-sized emerging pharmaceutical and biomedical companies that need top-level security, guaranteed disaster recovery, FDA compliance and flexibility. Biglin says that Ready-IT BioPharma, which launched late last month, just might be the only system of its kind.

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Safeguard Scientifics invests $5 million in locally-based Quinnova

Now this is what we like to see: local VCs investing in local companies.

Wayne-based Safeguard Scientifics has invested $5 million in Newtown-based Quinnova Pharmaceuticals. The investment leads a Series B expansion round of $17.4 million.

According to a press release, the company will use the investment in part to fund a Phase III clinical trial and to aid in the company’s sales and marketing efforts. Quinnova specializes in developing drugs that can be applied through the skin and has a patent on technology for a delivering skin medicine in a foam.

According the Inquirer’s Joe Destefano, Quinnova employs 40 people and is developing additional products under its Proderm and Neosalus brands.

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Friday Q&A: Sherrill Neff, founding partner of Quaker BioVentures

Sherrill Neff

Thanks to the city’s glut of local universities and pharmaceutical companies, Philadelphia is a wonderful environment for a biotech startup to begin and to exit.

However, with the lack of an IPO market and current economic conditions, statups often need hundreds of millions of dollars to see their idea from research product to sale to big pharma.

And that’s where Quaker BioVentures steps in.

Founded in 2003 by Ira Lubert, Brenda Gavin and Sherrill Neff, Quaker takes pride in keeping all of its investments local — and for good reason. Philadelphia benefits from being in the center of the perfect storm of plentiful university research combined with a large number of pharmaceutical companies having major local operations.

“It’s important we get to know the [big pharmaceutical companies] really well, that they are our friends socially and professionally,” says Neff. “It’s easier here than if we were sitting on the West coast trying to have that interaction.”

After raising $280 million in 2003 and an additional $420 in 2006, Quaker has invested in over 25 companies, most based in the tri-state area.

We talked to Founding Partner Sherrill Neff about why Quaker only invests locally, how the citiy’s biotech market has evolved and why he credits lion slaying as one of his hobbies.

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Friday Q&A: Russell Greig of GlaxoSmithKline’s SR One

Russell Greig has come a long way.

The 57-year-old Scotsman, who still carries that signature and recognizable accent, rode a Fulbright scholarship and a nearly three-decades-long career with pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline to head SR One, the company’s corporate venture capital arm that is no small part of this region’s VC scene, last year.

Greig himself is a fine personification of GSK’s history, now a London-based multinational that grew through several mergers and acquisitions from a 19th-century Philadelphia research laboratory.

GSK still has Philadelphia offices, but it is decidedly an international affair now, neatly represented by Greig and his resume stuffed with international datelines.

SR One itself has, perhaps like Greig who assumed his new leadership role in June 2008, moved. It was launched 24 years ago in Center City but now is a suburban venture, nestled in Conshohocken, like what regional biomedical companies in which they invest.

The University of Manchester alumnus seems to like it here though, raving about the schools and calling those Philadelphia suburbs home to more beautiful trees and seasons than most anywhere he’s seen.

But our life sciences he says, just might not be as distinctive as we’d like to think, no matter the recent attention we’ve gotten for them.

Below, Greig explains why SR One is so Philadelphia, what he would do if he was king and why he “carefully” calls our region’s biomedical innovation disappointing.

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