{"id":13525,"date":"2015-02-21T15:00:55","date_gmt":"2015-02-21T23:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/?p=13525"},"modified":"2017-06-04T12:02:03","modified_gmt":"2017-06-04T19:02:03","slug":"the-coming-boom-in-brain-medicines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2015\/02\/the-coming-boom-in-brain-medicines","title":{"rendered":"The Coming Boom In Brain Medicines"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"user_name\" href=\"http:\/\/www.forbes.com\/sites\/matthewherper\/\"> Matthew Herper <\/a> \u2014 <span class=\"title\">Forbes<br \/>\n<\/span><br \/>\n<br \/> TONY COLES COULD have had any job he wanted in the drug industry. In five years at the helm of cancer drug developer Onyx Pharmaceuticals he increased its market cap eightfold by purchasing an experimental blood cancer drug for $800 million, developing it into a big seller and flipping the whole company to Amgen AMGN +1.01% for $10.4 billion in October 2013. He personally made $60 million on the deal. Biotech watchers expected him to start another cancer company or even command a drug giant like Merck or Pfizer PFE &minus;0.29%.<\/p>\n<p>Instead, Coles, 54, is using his own money to build a Cambridge, Mass.-based startup called Yumanity that is using yeast, the microbes that help make bread and beer, to study how misfolded proteins in the brain cause Alzheimer\u2019s, Lou Gehrig\u2019s disease and Parkinson\u2019s, and to create drugs based on that knowledge. There\u2019s already interest from Big Pharma. Coles says he chose to attack brain diseases, not tumors, because the need is so dire and the science is so fresh.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe\u2019ve got 50 million people around the world who have these diseases, costing $650 billion a year, and lots of families like mine that have been affected,\u201d says Coles. \u201cI had a grandmother who died of the complications of Alzheimer\u2019s disease. I think about my own health as well.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.forbes.com\/sites\/matthewherper\/2015\/02\/11\/brain-boom-the-drug-companies-bringing-neuroscience-back-from-the-brink\/\" target=\"_blank\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Matthew Herper \u2014 Forbes TONY COLES COULD have had any job he wanted in the drug industry. In five years at the helm of cancer drug developer Onyx Pharmaceuticals he increased its market cap eightfold by purchasing an experimental blood cancer drug for $800 million, developing it into a big seller and flipping the whole [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":76,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13525","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13525","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/76"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13525"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13525\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":64825,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13525\/revisions\/64825"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13525"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13525"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13525"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}