Dr. Maria Maccecchini, the CEO of QR Pharmaceuticals in Berwyn, Pennsylvania, is poised to accept the 2011 Iris Newman award for her work as a serial entrepreneur in biotechnology, a career that has spanned more than 20 years.
The award will be presented by the Alliance of Women Entrepreneurs on Nov. 14.
Maccecchini’s work has predominantly focused on studying neurodegeneration in stroke victims at Symphony Pharmaceuticals and at QR Pharmaceuticals, where the company is developing two therapeutics to treat Alzheimer’s disease using technology licensed from NIH/Torrey Pines. One targets the early stage of the disease with the goal of halting its progression and the second targets late-stage Alzheimer’s. Posiphen, the lead compound, produced encouraging results in its third phase 1 study. The drug did normalize levels of toxic protein in the brain to healthy levels of mild Alzheimer’s disease patients back to the levels seen in healthy normal volunteers.
“We treated the patients for two weeks,” said Maccecchini. “We need to raise the money to treat patients for 18 months to show normal cognition. It is a slow, steady decline and we need the time to show the difference.”
Having built Symphony Pharmaceuticals into a staff of 120, Symphony’s name was later changed to Annovis and was acquired by Transgenomic in 2001. Between Symphony and QR, she became an angel investor at Robin Hood Ventures and Mid-Atlantic Angel Group, a role that left her with a strong desire to return to the laboratory.
“You end up being torn between two motives — between helping people and making money. I was sometimes conflicted between the side of the founder and the side of the investors. You also play a marginal role. I wanted to be involved.”
Despite the multitude of setbacks experienced by companies developing drugs for Alzheimer’s, Maccecchini believes the timing may be right for medication that takes a different approach to the disease.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
“In the past two years, people have been changing their approach and moving away from attacking the plaque in the brain, which is a consequence of the disease, not the cause. We actually have a better approach and it’s slowly being recognized.”
The award is named after a friend who was instrumental in forming the Alliance of Women Entrepreneurs and who founded and led Veritas Medical Services before she died of a brain tumor.
“Iris was a friend of many of us,” said Maccecchini. “She wanted women to succeed so much.”
