P.A. Tech. LLC Launches Its First Product with an Eye on the Future

CoFounders Ed Esposito and Tony Shrout in the laboratory of P.A. Technologies LLC at 101 University Drive, Amherst.

By the time Tony Shrout and Ed Esposito (’05 Ph.D.s with Robert Weis and Craig Martin, resp.) graduated, their dream of starting a Biotech company had ‘taken shape’.  Protein Attachment Technologies, LLC (P. A. Tech, www.patechllc.com) was founded February 2006 by Tony and Ed, with Weis and Tim Shrout, to produce innovative high-throughput enzyme assays of kinase activity.  Kinases are central figures in disease-related cell signal transduction pathways.  As graduate students, Tony and his colleagues in the Weis lab had demonstrated that template-directed assembly (TDA) was an effective method to make membrane-associated enzymes function better – in a way that mimics cellular behavior.  With an exclusive license from the University for the patent-pending TDA technology, P. A. Tech Tony and Ed set out to build a better mouse trap, that is, to create assays that identify promising drug leads more effectively.

Along the way, Tony and Ed have faced a many challenges, not the least is starting a biotech company in Amherst.  Identifying a location, getting through the town and state permitting processes, designing the lab, overseeing its construction, as well as acquiring lab equipment, all had to be done while moving the technology toward commercialization.  Despite the demands of setting up the business, Tony and Ed continue to get out the story about the new technology.  In Montreal last year, a poster describing TDA won an award at the 13th Annual Conference of the Society for Biomolecular Screening (SBS), and a report on TDA as a drug screening platform has just been published (Chem. Biol. Drug Des. 2008, 71:278-81).  This April, Tony and Ed will return to the SBS conference (in St. Louis this year) with an added new role – as vendors.  Just last December, P. A. Tech finalized a sales and distribution agreement with Millipore Inc., a world leader in life sciences products (www.millipore.com), to market the nanoparticle template material that forms the basis of TDA-enabled assays.  Millipore’s marketing, distribution and sales prowess, screening services, and industry contacts will help to get the pharmaceutical industry to use new TDA-enabled assays, which is paramount to the fledging company.  Because high-throughput screening is a multibillion market, with billions of samples (wells) measured each year, a market acceptance of just a few percent translates into substantial revenue.  P. A. Tech plans to make inroads with unique new valued-added assays.  Scientific and business advice continues to be an essential part of this development.  On the science side, the advisory board is comprised of Weis (chair), Prof. Dhandapani Venkataraman, Adj. Professor Tomi Sawyer (VP of Drug Discovery & Innovative Technologies at AILERON Therapeutics), and Dr. Tony Pawson (Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute) a world-leader in signal transduction research.  On the business side, advice is being sought from many sectors of the Biotech industry. As P. A. Tech progresses through the next stage of development – the introduction and adoption of new assays and biological reagents – both an infusion of capital and personnel are being sought – stay tuned for more exciting developments from this home-grown venture.

(March 2008)