Drug development startup Chase Pharmaceuticals Corp. is now being led from Irvine with a familiar face at the helm—Chief Executive Douglas Ingram, a former president of Allergan Inc.
The startup has been based in Washington, D.C., since its founding nine years ago.
It focuses on drugs for Alzheimer’s disease, a neurodegenerative condition affecting more than 5 million people in the U.S. alone. Its lead drug candidate, CPC-201, is set to go into a third-phase clinical trial this year.
Ingram said last week that Chase was shifting to Orange County as it continues to seek clearance to go to market, drawn by the area’s talent pool.
“I think there’s so much talent out here in Southern California … that was [fostered] in connection with Allergan and its growth,” he said.
“As we build out and get bigger, we’re going to build it all in Orange County,” he said of Chase Pharmaceuticals. “All the rest of the company is going to be built in Orange County.”
The company has taken space in the Irvine Towers office campus at 18200 Von Karman Ave. Ingram noted that Newport Beach-based landlord Irvine Company “will find me bigger space essentially on a moment’s notice” when needed.
Lead drug candidate CPC-201 is an oral combination of donepezil, an already-existing drug marketed under the name Aricept, and a cholinergic blocker to treat Alzheimer’s disease. It is formulated in a way that Ingram said cuts down on problems with dosing that can lead to side effects, such as nausea and diarrhea.
“We’re going to take the one thing that absolutely works, and we’re going to make it better,” he said.
Chase is prerevenue and remains some years away from commercialization—Ingram said it could happen in 2019 if the Food and Drug Administration approves CPC-201.
The company does not disclose information about its funding.
The drug developer is being operated in a “lean, simple, elegant” manner, Ingram said, referring to a philosophy espoused by former Allergan Chief Executive David Pyott, under whom Ingram worked for many of his years at Allergan.
Chase now has eight employees and expects to end the year with 15, with contract research and contract manufacturers handling much of the workload at this point.
“We do a lot of work today through consultants and contractors,” Ingram said, adding that the company is starting to build but does not anticipate becoming “massive” while its candidate is in development.
Ingram said he anticipates Chase’s employment to grow to 30 to 40 workers in the next couple of years prior to potential FDA approval.
Big Potential
“If we get positive results, as I hope we will and believe we will in 2018, then we have to prepare to commercialize this drug, and we’ll be over 1,000 [workers],” Ingram said.
Commercialization of the drug would bring the need for a sales force, as well as a medical affairs department to assist prescribing doctors.
“I think one of the significant areas [that’s] the biggest value to the medical community is medical affairs. Once we have the results from the Phase III in hand, I’d build [that department up],” Ingram said, adding that he learned the importance of having a strong medical affairs department in his Allergan days.
Ingram joined Chase last year after having been with Allergan since 1996. He has been credited with running Allergan with an expert hand for much of 2014, when Pyott oversaw its defense against a hostile takeover attempt and eventual $72.5 billion sale to Actavis PLC, which has since taken the Allergan name.
The alumnus of the University of Arizona and Arizona State University also served as president of Allergan’s Europe, Middle East and Africa region and had other executive roles with the drugmaker prior to his elevation in 2013 to the president’s post.
Ingram said his past with Allergan has been “invaluable” since he took the top job at Chase.
He said he wanted to make sure that working at Chase is “exciting,” similar to the feeling he had while at Allergan.
“I was excited about going to Allergan every day,” he said. “I really felt like we were doing something important. I wanted to do something that I could get excited about in the same way. I wasn’t looking for title; I wasn’t looking for size.”
DC Roots
Drs. Thomas Chase and Kathleen Clarence-Smith—Washington, D.C.-area neurologists with ties to the National Institutes of Health and Swiss drug giant Roche AG, respectively—co-founded Chase Pharmaceuticals in 2007.
Both are still with the company—namesake Chase serves as chief scientific officer, and Clarence-Smith serves as chief medical officer. Chase will maintain offices in the Beltway, according to Ingram.
Ingram also continues to serve as vice chairman and a director of Nemus Bioscience Inc., a publicly traded company in Costa Mesa that is developing drugs based on cannabinoids, which are compounds found in marijuana.
