In September 1997 one of those twists took place. Duke University announced that YT Chen's group would also be conducting clinical trials of ERT, in collaboration with a company called Synpac Pharmaceuticals. They would be using the more 'traditional' method of producing the enzyme in Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells engineered to produce the human enzyme.
This just seemed incredible - not one but two pharmaceutical companies, competing to conduct a clinical trial and bring a product to market.
In a pretty strange and complicated saga, Synpac were one of the more mysterious participants. They were (probably still are) a Taiwanese company, very private, whose main line of business was the bulk production of generic pharmaceuticals like penicillin. How they became involved with Pompe disease is a story that I suspect only YT Chen knows.
Anyhow, by the end of 1997 we had two teams racing to stage a clinical trial of ERT, something which seemed impossible just a few years before.
However, this was just a taste of what was to come...
Saturday 12 December 2009
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