A new medical device company hopes to be a breeding ground for new drug-device combos, and companies.

Novita Therapeutics, whose birth was announced on Friday, is the brainchild of Nicholas Franano, M.D., and William P. Whitaker, Esq, co-founders of Proteon Therapeutics, Inc., a drug research company.

The goal of the Lenexa, Kan.-based start-up, first conceived in June by Franano and Whitaker while they were still at Proteon, is to find early-development products and groom them to the point where they're ready for large venture capital financing and full-blown clinical trials. At that stage, the company would then spin off new companies devoted to pushing the product through the regulatory hoops and bringing it to market, leaving the parent company free to pursue other lines of research. New products would go through the process about once every two years.

"We're trying to create another model to try to spur the development of innovative new products," Franano tells DOTmed News.

Franano believes this model is key to turning the business into an "innovation engine" by making sure it never gets scuttled by one unwieldy discovery. It would work by letting the company achieve a sort of "Goldilocks" balance between companies that are too big and create cultures hostile to innovation, and ones too small where the first clinically successful product often threatens to overwhelm the company's strained resources and forces them to abandon everything else.

"When you get a lead product that's successful, it sucks all the oxygen out of the room, it just dominates the small company," Franano says. "There's almost nothing you'd do at the early stage that would be meaningful relative to this huge clinical asset."

While the pipeline is empty for now, Franano, formerly an interventional radiologist, hopes to focus both on his specialty and on drug-device combinations in cardiovascular, renal and GI. "One of the things we're looking at very closely is a [GI] oncology drug to re-purpose for local cardiovascular," Franano says. The drug, in early clinical trials, would combine with a delivery device.

"We haven't really settled on the first two or three development programs," he says, "but it won't take long. There are lots of assets stalled, and not a lot of capital."

FINANCING

Novita has also closed its first round of financing, helped in part by angel investments through the Kansas Technology Enterprise Corporation, a public-private entity designed to promote tech businesses in the state.

"It administers a state program where an angel investor, in an early-stage technology company, can get a 50 percent state tax credit back for investments," explains Franano. "It makes Kansas very competitive for attracting early stage biotech companies," he adds.

But Whitaker and Franano haven't fully cut their ties with Proteon. Both men will serve as consultants for the company, and Franano will still sit on its board of directors.

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