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Floyd Taub, M.D. featured on the cover of TechGazette, October 1999

Sitting behind a desk in one of the two modular buildings that house Cell Works Inc., a bioscience start-up, Alan Cheung tosses out an oft-used cliché, one that somehow seems appropriate when discussing cancer research.

"This is everyone's Holy Grail," says Cell Works' senior vice president of the company's research in cancer cell isolation. "We're now only in the first step."

Roughly 30 miles away, Dr. Floyd Taub cues up a videotape at the offices of his bioscience company, Dovetail Technologies Inc. He smiles slightly as the Fleetwood Mac refrain — "Don't stop thinking about tomorrow" — signals the start of a collection of features profiling Dovetail and the cancer drug they are developing.

Cell Works and Dovetail Technologies — both Maryland incubator companies — are looking into the future, to a day when their work may be instrumental in the fight against cancer, the nation's second-leading cause of death.

Dovetail Technologies, located at the University of Maryland's TAP incubator, is in the midst of Phase I/11 clinical trials for its drug Betathine. Also known as Beta LT, the drug could trigger "a revolution in the way we treat cancer," according to Taub, by stimulating the body's cancer-fighting ability rather than using toxins to kill cancerous cells. Taub calls current cancer-fighting methods "the slash, burn and poison approach ... very crude methods are used."

"Acute treatment causes remissions, but in more than half the cases ... the cancer comes back," Taub adds. "Instead of taking that approach, we're working to stimulate the body's immune system."

After promising results treating myeloma, a common form of bone cancer, and lymphoma in animals, Beta LT is being used in patients at McGill University in Canada.

"The drug has proved very nontoxic," says Taub, the founder of Digene who is running his third company out of the TAP incubator. "So we've moved onto the Phase II aspect, which is, does the drug work?"

Dr. Floyd Taub of Dovetail Technologies, which is in the midst of Phase I/II Clincal trials for its cancer-fighting drug Betathine.

At Cell Works, based at UMBC, 35 scientists and technicians are refining a blood test that detects early on and measures the presence of circulating cancer cells, particularly prostate cancer. Using a patented computerized microscope, Cell Works can automate and analyze cancer cells on a slide. The early detection can give doctors significant advantages in plotting a course of treatment, be it surgery, radiation or chemotherapy.

"It provides a way of detecting, with fairly high conclusiveness," says Charles H. Wheatley, Cell Works' president and chief operating officer. "We actually take a picture of the cancer cell. ... I label this as the identification and hopefully arrest of the No. 1 serial killer in the history of the world."

Dr. Paul Ts'o, a well-known researcher and Johns Hopkins biophysics professor, serves as Cell Works' chairman and CEO. Company scientists are working to make the technology available to isolate and characterize other epithelial cancer cells, particularly those found in breast cancer and kidney cancer.

Cell Works has so far funded its work with about $10 million in start-up capital raised from about 180 shareholders, according to Wheatley. They are targeting an initial public offering in 18 to 24 months, once production of the test is ramped up.

"We've already demonstrated A, that it works, B, there's a market, and C, you can do it," Wheatley says.

So where will the next tech star be hatched? Could it be hyperoffice.com, founded last year and headquartered at the InfoAge Business Center in Baltimore? Its suite of business technology platforms, accessible by companies over the Internet, was featured at the DemoMobile technology showcase in the spring.

Or could it be Transpartum Inc., a veterinary pharmaceutical company located in Rockville's privately owned Association for Entrepreneurial Science? Transpartum is working to produce what is essentially a fertility drug for cows, which could also be used to treat reproductive abnormalities.

Incubators are seen as links every bit as crucial as universities, military bases or corporate headquarters in mining Maryland's intellectual capital for the next big thing. Consider Harford County, which is revamping plans for its incubator at the Higher Education and Applied Technology Center. County officials, in hopes of eventually using the HEAT Center to cultivate their own high-tech businesses, are focusing on the local Aberdeen Proving Ground and generating research and development support services for the base. Maybe the next Visual Networks will be the result

"Until we establish the critical mass on site ... we're really looking at a program where we want to get these growing business relationships," says Tom Sadowski, Harford County's director of economic development. "We're trying to sell that more and more ... to try and stage ourselves as more of a destination."

- TechGazette

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