LEGAL BRIEFS
As featured in
LEGAL PERSPECTIVE FROM
BRUCE W. LEAVERTON
Seattle
Business
Dr. Colleen Delaney
and Fred Hutch:
Bringing cord stem cell discoveries to the marketplace.
T
he statistics are sobering. Every three minutes, someone in
the United States is diagnosed with leukemia, lymphoma
or another form of blood cancer. And every nine minutes,
someone dies of blood cancer, according to the Leukemia &
Lymphoma Society.
Too often, the outcome from treatment (whether from
transplantation or chemotherapy) is not a cure but a severely
compromised blood and immune system, leaving the patient too
often fatally vulnerable to infection.
One of Seattle’s most venerable institutions, the Fred Hutchinson
Cancer Research Center (Fred Hutch) remains a beacon of hope
Historically, the challenge for the Hutch,
a nonprofit, has been to take its scientific
discoveries and develop them into
commercially viable products or technologies
accessible to patients in clinical settings.
for these patients. Fred Hutch has long been in the forefront of
discovering effective treatments for blood cancers, particularly
bone marrow transplantation and related innovations. In 1990, Fred
Hutch’s Dr. E. Donnall Thomas won the Nobel Prize for his life-saving
bone marrow transplantation work.
Today, the therapeutic potency of healthy stem cells in combating
blood cancers is not limited to cells harvested from patients or
compatible donors. Through the work of Fred Hutch’s Drs. Irwin
Bernstein and Colleen Delaney, stem cells from donated umbilical
cords can be effectively instructed to multiply, rapidly differentiating
into mature cells that assist patients in preventing life-threatening
infections. Once infused into patients, these super cells can help
clear a pathway back to health.
Historically, the challenge for the Hutch, a nonprofit, has been to
take its scientific discoveries and develop them into commercially
viable products or technologies accessible to patients in clinical
settings. Adding industry partners and creating spinoff companies
can help speed that process.
“We’re sitting on top of these transformative treatments. There are
people out there with cancer who are dying as we sit here talking,
and we can’t get the drugs out fast enough,” said Dr. Gary Gilliland,
Fred Hutch’s president and director. “So, we can take this into our
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hands and say, ‘We’re bringing intellectual property that has value
that can help us monetize the efforts to try to bring these things
forward more rapidly.’”
Today, Fred Hutch has an increased focus on developing
partnerships with the private sector and developing its discoveries
into lifesaving real world treatments and technologies. Such
partnerships create a win-win — benefiting patients by making
new treatments available faster and Fred Hutch by capturing the
commercial value of its discoveries.
Nowhere is this new entrepreneurial approach more promising
than in Fred Hutch’s most recent spinoff, Nohla Therapeutics, which
launched in December 2015. Nohla is a stem cell therapy company
focused on developing off-the-shelf, on-demand universal donor
therapies that require no tissue-type matching. Its first product, a
new cord blood stem cell product developed by Delaney, utilizes a
platform produced after two decades worth of research conducted
by Fred Hutch teams led by Bernstein and Delaney.
Nohla would not exist were it not for the vision and persistence
of Delaney. When she was a fellow working in Bernstein’s lab, she
told Bernstein she wanted to translate the lab’s work on cord blood
expansion to the public.
“It was kind of ridiculous for anybody at that stage of the game
to propose,” said Bernstein, laughing. “It’s early; the amount of
regulatory stuff, just the amount of work it required would take
almost an entire lab to do it.” Delaney was undeterred. “She did it
singlehandedly, basically,” he said.
No fewer than seven Hutch-owned licenses cover this product and
its key attribute of not requiring HLA [tissue-type] matching, which
means it can be given to “anyone at any time,” Delaney said.
With Nohla’s launch, Delaney will continue to oversee her laboratory
at Fred Hutch and run the center’s Cord Blood Transplant Program.
Located in South Lake Union, and surrounded by entrepreneurial
enterprises of various kinds, Fred Hutch, Delaney and her colleagues
seem particularly well positioned to nurture future partners and help
bring their breakthroughs in cancer research to the marketplace.
BRUCE W. LEAVERTON is a Shareholder at Lane Powell, where
he focuses his practice on business finance, mergers and
acquisitions, licensing transactions and restructuring matters.
Reach him at leavertonb@lanepowell.com or 206.223.7389.
LEGAL
REPORT