Medicine by Design: The Practice and Promise of Biomedical Engineering

CHAPTER 14. Weng’s Wars

Chapter 14 Weng’s Wars In her struggle to find a treatment for debilitating eye diseases like retinitis pigmentosa, Weng Tao has faced innumerable woes. Fortunately for her and her colleagues at the biomedical start-up Neurotech , Tao also has possessed an equal measure of single-minded drive. As a result, the tiny Neurotech team has done what few small companies ever accomplish: getting a product into human clinical trials. Tao and her colleagues also are tantalizingly close to combining cellular therapies with a device, an elusive goal in the world of biomedical engineering. None of this would likely have happened without Tao, whose self-assurance and resourcefulness were forged in her early years in China. Tao was born in Beijing in 1959. As a girl she lived through a decade of repression during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution and entered university a year after Mao’s death in 1976. She eventually went to medical school and worked for a year as an intern in Beijing Childrens Hospital. “Basically I felt very helpless when I was told there were no treatments for many life-threatening diseases,” said Tao, an unassuming, plainspoken woman with black hair cut neatly to her chin. “I saw patients die under my care. I saw children die. A doctor can’t help patients if there is no effective therapy for a disease. And I realized that maybe being an MD was not good enough for me. So I thought maybe I should go into a field where I can design new therapies.” While living in China, she learned to maneuver within a hostile
system, a skill that would serve her well when the atmosphere turned chilly and discordant in some of the companies that preceded Neurotech . “In China for me to do anything at all I had to be very creative or I’d wind up trapped in bureaucracy,” said Tao. “I could see that the U.S. was the land of opportunity. But when I got here I found that many people believe things can’t be done because there are so many rules and regulations. People have the opportunities but often they choose not to explore them.People would tell me that the FDA would never allow us to use the cells we chose for the encapsulated cell technology [ECT], but I would say,‘Rules are made by people. Let’s show them the data and persuade them to change their positions.’ I often ask questions and negotiate a solution. I don’t necessarily just accept the answers.” Tao came to the United States in 1983 at age 24, receiving a Ph.D. in cell physiology and biophysics at the University of Connecticut Health Center. She went on to do postdoctoral research in molecular immunology at Yale University and then worked for several companies . In 1996 she went to work for a Rhode Island biotechnology start-up, CytoTherapeutics. Among the company’s endeavors was an effort to commercialize an encapsulated cell technology developed by two Swiss scientists, Patrick Aebischer and Pier Galletti, both then of Brown University. The pair invented one of the earliest versions of the technology, which involved, in Tao’s words,“loading cells that produce a therapeutic factor in a capsule, which is implanted in a host.” The goal was to treat diseases such as diabetes and Parkinson’s with a long-lasting stream of substances,such as insulin or dopamine, generated by cells inside the permeable capsule. From the beginning, however, scientists at CytoTherapeutics faced an overwhelming challenge : how to ensure that the cells, encased in a semipermeable membrane , stayed alive and churned out disease-fighting molecules. The company, which at one point had more than a hundred employees , dropped the diabetes research early on. The Parkinson’s experiments met the same fate. The company did conduct human trials on a device filled with cells that released a pain-killing substance, but results in clinical trials showed it to have marginal effect. WENG’S WARS 169 170 MEDICINE BY DESIGN Meanwhile, Tao was deep into research she believed showed great promise—genetically modifying encapsulated cells to secrete therapeutic proteins. She continued to work on numerous scientific challenges, including keeping the cells alive for an extended period of time in the capsule. But as she delved deeper into her work, CytoTherapeutics plunged into financial trouble, and the environment became increasingly “toxic,” according to molecular biologist Paul Stabila, one of...