One of Seattle’s leading life sciences entrepreneurs, Bruce Carter, is back in the saddle. Carter has agreed to take an active management role as executive chairman of Seattle-based Immune Design, a year after he announced he was retiring as CEO of ZymoGenetics (NASDAQ: ZGEN).

Carter has agreed to work about three days a week at the startup vaccine developer as executive chairman, while co-founder Steve Reed will stay as full-time CEO. Carter’s top three goals are to bring in “money, money, and more money,” he says, by tapping his global network of investment and pharma industry contacts who might be interested in what Immune Design has started, he says.

“I got seduced by the science and the idea of learning something new,” Carter says. He added: “I was a little afraid I’d get bored.”

The addition of Carter is just the latest in a string of big names who have aligned themselves with Immune Design. The company got started in June 2008 with an $18 million venture financing led by Rick Klausner of The Column Group, Ed Penhoet of Alta Partners, and Brian Atwood of Versant Ventures. They bet on technology from the Caltech lab of David Baltimore and Reed’s team at the Infectious Disease Research Institute in Seattle. The vision is to create the first generation of vaccines that can be designed to stimulate specific cell types needed to prevent an illness, fight off an existing infection, or possibly even kill tough cancer cells.

As many people in Seattle biotech know, Carter is one of the big personalities of the local cluster. He is the British-born microbiologist who is essentially the founder of the modern version of ZymoGenetics. He first joined the company in 1986, and later oversaw the operation when he became chief scientific officer of Novo Nordisk, which acquired Zymo in 1988. He led ZymoGenetics’ transformation from a U.S. research wing of Novo into a standalone private company in 2000, and then took Zymo public in 2002. He retired on Jan. 1 of this year.

Bruce Carter

Since then, Carter has stayed busy through serving as chairman of ZymoGenetics; as a director of India-based Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories, a generic drugmaker; and of the nonprofit TB Alliance. At first, he wasn’t really that interested in joining the board of Immune Design.

“I got a call from the chairman of the board, Ed Penhoet, and he asked me, ‘How are you enjoying your retirement?” Carter says. “I told him, ‘I’m really enjoying it, I haven’t been bored a single day.’”

Even so, Carter agreed to listen to Penhoet’s proposal about Immune Design. The two have known each other for more than two decades dating back to when Carter was at Novo and Penhoet was one of the biotech industry’s pioneers at Chiron. Carter says he was impressed by the group of people who have coalesced around the new company. “There were some heavy hitters involved,” Carter says.

But vaccines were out of Carter’s comfort zone, so he has had to learn some new things.

Carter says he plans to concentrate on external partnership talks and fundraising for Immune Design. Carter will use some of his business experience to help “do a little organizing” of the staff, which … Next Page »

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Immune Design, the Seattle-based vaccine development company, has obtained a worldwide exclusive license to develop a vaccine-boosting compound invented at the Infectious Disease Research Institute (IDRI). The technology, a glycopyranosyl lipid adjuvant, may be used to enhance the effectiveness of vaccines. The nonprofit IDRI will receive an upfront payment, milestone payments on success in testing, and royalties from sales if it ever turns into a product, as well as shares in Immune Design, a startup that raised $18 million in a Series A venture round in June.

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Steve Reed sums up his goal for Immune Design, his new vaccine company, in a few bullet points: Better protection, fewer doses, less raw material.

The Seattle-based company got started last month with $18 million in first-round financing from The Column Group, Alta Partners, and Versant Ventures. The idea is to make vaccines loaded with immune-boosters called adjuvants. They’ll be made to stimulate dendritic cells, which are sort of like conductors telling other cells in the immune system which foreign invaders to fight.

I caught up with Reed down the hall from our new Xconomy office, at the the Infectious Disease Research Institute (IDRI), the nonprofit institute he founded in 1993 to tackle diseases of the developing world.

Reed isn’t ready yet to reveal Immune Design’s first vaccine candidate. But he said it should be ready for clinical trials within a year. The company has licensed the technology from IDRI, which has already done most of the animal tests and manufacturing work.

Immune Design is licensing potential commercial applications like flu, HIV, hepatitis C, or certain types of cancer. Other uses of the adjuvant more practical for diseases of the developing world, like tuberculosis or malaria, will stay within the nonprofit IDRI. If any of the commercial applications are a hit, Immune Design will plow a royalty stream back into the IDRI.

“It’s a Robin Hood approach,” Reed says.

One example that symbolizes room for improvement is the DPT vaccine, Reed says. Infants in the U.S. have to take the vaccine—short for diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus—in four doses, because it stimulates a generalized immune reaction, not a specific one, against the pathogens in its name. Immune Design would stimulate a more specific defense, using a synthetic adjuvant hitched to an engineered virus or snippet of protein. The result could be a single-shot vaccine. That’s highly useful in the developing world, where it’s difficult to get people to show up for multiple doses, and highly convenient for patients in the United States.

“It really shouldn’t have to be four shots,” Reed says. “There needs to be more innovation there.”

It’s just an example, because DPT is a cheap, relatively effective commodity vaccine that Immune Design isn’t looking to improve upon. The company is busy building up a staff of three into a team of 35 scientists to do the early development work on new vaccine candidates.

Reed is visibly excited about the new-generation adjuvants. No currently marketed vaccine contains this form of synthetic adjuvant. The adjuvant will be combined with an engineered virus, licensed from the Caltech lab of David Baltimore, that efficiently spreads the immune-booster through the body. In other cases, Immune Design may use key snippets of protein to train the immune system to fight without having the potential to actually make people sick, like weakened live-virus vaccines can.

Reed plans to spend 80 percent of his time at the new company, and the rest of his time at the nonprofit institute, where he will continue to oversee grant work sponsored by the National Institutes of Health and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Steve Davis, the former CEO of Seattle-based digital media company Corbis, has been brought in as interim CEO of IDRI to keep that institute on track.

Immune Design isn’t the only company trying to develop next-generation vaccines, particularly since Merck showed last year it could sell $1.5 billion worth of Gardasil, a $150-per-vial vaccine for cervical cancer, proving that vaccines don’t have to be cheap commodities. Other competitors include Pfizer, the world’s largest drugmaker, VentiRx, a San Diego-based startup company, and VaxInnate of Cranbury, NJ.

Clinical trials for new vaccines need to enroll thousands of patients to demonstrate safety—too costly for any venture-backed startup to do single-handedly. Rather than cut a deal with a pharmaceutical company right away, Immune Design plans to partner with academic labs for early-stage tests to show a vaccine’s value. It’s a departure from Reed’s experience at Corixa, the Seattle biotech company, where the mantra was “partner early, partner often.” Corixa got someone else to pay for its research, Reed says, yet retained slim royalty rights to potentially valuable products.

By waiting longer to sign a deal with a pharmaceutical company, Immune Design shoulders more of the risk in clinical trials, but could stand to get much richer if they pan out. That could bode well for Reed’s “Robin Hood” strategy.

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