Thomas P. Mathers realized in late 2003 that it was time to pump up Peptimmune's pipeline. After being spun off with $5 million in seed money from Genzyme in 2002, the Boston company collected $42 million in venture capital and added a third autoimmune disease program based on its founding technology in 2003. "We were chugging along and building the franchise, growing the company, and I realized... that we had a lot of very early stage, very cogent programs, but all early stage," Mathers, the company's president and CEO, recalls. "Unfortunately in our business you're rewarded for products, not platform technology."
So Mathers and his team set out to leverage Peptimmune's core assets by finding a later-stage product to in-license. This is a tough proposition, he points out, not only because late-stage products with good intellectual property and proof of concept in humans are rare, but because small companies like ...
