Dr. Arthur “Buzz” Brown describes his company’s acquisition of a Rockville, Md., contract research organization as a 1 + 1 = 5 kind of deal.
Brown’s company, ChanTest Corp. in Garfield Heights, uses its catalog of cell lines to produce ion channels — the membrane proteins responsible for the electrical activity of all cells — to help drug companies figure out what drugs to make and whether those drugs are safe and effective.
Last week, ChanTest acquired Applied Cell Sciences for undisclosed terms. Applied Cell Sciences specializes in G-protein coupled receptors — more proteins used to discover and develop drugs.
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So the addition of one company will multiply ChanTest’s opportunities. It now will have cell lines that cover nearly half of known drug targets. It doubles ChanTest’s customer base and its product offerings.
And because ion channels and G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) often are used at the same time, it offers opportunities for new combinations of the two types of drug targets.
For example, “one of the things people are trying to design drugs for is … regulating heart rate,” Brown said. “The way the heart rate is normally regulated involves a GPCRÂ and an ion channel.” ChanTest now can offer testing systems using both targets.
“This acquisition is the perfect fit,” he said.
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ChanTest will keep its Garfield Heights facility and its 70 employees, said Brown, his company’s president and chief executive. Applied Cell Sciences (ACS)Â also will keep its Maryland facility and its five employees. ACS’ products will be sold under the ChanTest name.
In addition, ChanTest gets the entrepreneurial expertise of Jesse Baumgold, the serial entrepreneur who sold ACS to ChanTest. Baumgold will continue to lead his Rockville staff as vice president of business development for ChanTest.
“Jesse is an expert in reagents, reagent development and reagent sales,” Brown said. “He brings to the table skills over and above the science expertise.”
ACS also brings operating technology to its new parent. “They have certain technologies that we’re going to be able to install at the Cleveland site, and then we’ve got stuff that they’re going to be able to install at the Rockville site,” Brown said.
Even before its first-ever acquisition, ChanTest was on a “strong growth trajectory,” Brown said. Started in 1998, ChanTest had “fairly good organic growth” until it won a $4.7 million grant from Ohio’s Third Frontier project in 2006.
“That enabled us to accelerate our growth” as a leader in fast, automated assays, or tests, using ion channels. One of ChanTest’s claims to fame was identifying the channel that, when blocked by a drug, can result in sudden cardiac death.
An antihistamine called Seldane was pulled from the market in the late-1990s after testing positive for this potential, Brown said. The Food and Drug Administration now requires drugs in development to be tested for this potential side-effect.
ChanTest is “a very successful contract research organization,” said Baiju Shah, president and chief executive of BioEnterprise, the health care company developer in Northeast Ohio. “They’ve developed around that niche test that Buzz Brown and his team have pioneered.”
