November 19, 2015
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
The job headline should read: “Wanted—Savvy CEO; Company Willing to Relocate.” Which is exactly what Ross Youngs, founder and interim chief executive officer of Dublin, Ohio-based Biosortia Pharmaceuticals is saying.
Biosortia Pharmaceuticals, with operations in central Ohio, is a subsidiary of Marysville, Ohio-based Algaeventure Systems Inc. The company harvests algae from what it’s calling “wild waterways” and trying to find rare and previously unidentified chemicals to license to pharmaceutical companies. Biosortia does the skimming and identification work, but Algaeventure has the equipment to “harvest and de-water huge masses of algae—and the mold, fungus and amoebas living with it—without destroying their chemical properties.”
Algaeventure’s original focus was on developing algae-based biofuels, but has since shifted to its current role in biopharma development.
“The stuff we’re finding in their large collections from around the country is absolutely amazing,” said Peter Moeller, program lead in toxins and natural products chemistry at the marine lab of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to BizJournals in 2013. “It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”
Young is also the chief executive officer of plastic company Univenture Systems Inc., also located in Marysville, Ohio. He indicates that his management team is excellent, so he can handle both companies during the search for a new head for Biosortia.
In 2013, the company hired Kurt Dieck as chief executive officer. Until 2013, Dieck was the senior vice president of strategy and business execution at Cardinal Health . Dieck has stepped down and Youngs is looking for someone to replace him, preferably someone with clinical drug development experience.
“On behalf of the entire company, I would like to express my gratitude and appreciation to Kurt for his service and dedication to Biosortia during his tenure,” Youngs said in a statement. “Under Mr. Dieck’s leadership, the business has successfully transformed from an algal technology company to a respected emerging drug discovery company on the verge of moving their first compounds into lead development.”
And Youngs is willing to move the company for the right candidate.
“We are actively considering moving our company headquarters to a pharmaceutical (industry) cluster,” Youngs to BizJournals, citing Boston or San Francisco as possibilities. The company currently employs seven people and contractors.
The samples the company acquires are frozen in Ohio and shipped to a laboratory in South Carolina to hunt for promising chemicals. It then licenses those compounds to pharmaceutical companies.
In 2014, Biosortia was awarded the 2014 Open Innovation Drug Discovery (OIDD) Collaborator of the Year award by Eli Lilly & Co. Since the company jointed Lilly’s OIDD program in 2012, Biosortia had almost 100 percent of its submitted compounds accepted, which completely outstrips the more typical 40 to 50 percent.
“Lilly’s OIDD program and the innovation that their team develops has created an opportunity for Biosortia to provide Lilly with the type of chemistry they are seeking—new, highly potent chemistry, resulting in new mechanisms of action,” said Guy Carter, Biosortia’s chief science officer in a statement at the time.
As of mid-2015, Biosortia had research agreements with four big pharma companies with more in the pipeline.
