Get most biotech executives talking about the FDA, and they usually tiptoe around with diplomatic sound bites, or maybe they’ll grumble about what they consider unreasonable burdens and arbitrary decisions by the U.S. drug regulatory agency.
The guys at Menlo Park, CA-based Optivia Biotechnology have a completely different take.
“The tougher the FDA gets, the better our business gets,” says Peter Milner, Optivia’s co-founder and executive vice president of corporate development.
Optivia, a company started four years ago with only about $500,000 in seed capital to date, has grown from one man’s idea in a garage into a profitable company with about 30 employees and a roster of 50 customers from Big Pharma, biotech, and academic research labs. Optivia has grown up based on a proprietary lab test that looks at transporter proteins that shuttle drugs, nutrients, and other substances in and out of cells. The field of research was pretty obscure when CEO Yong Huang got the company started in his garage (literally), but it has encountered some good fortune over the past year as the FDA has become increasingly vigilant in asking drugmakers to study the effect their compounds have on certain transporter proteins.
To read the full, original article click on this link: Optivia Biotech Finds its Way to Profits, With a Little Help from Friends at the FDA | Xconomy
Author:Luke Timmerman
