Portera working on compound to cure cancer, Alzheimer’s Startup takes on long odds

BY MIKE SCOTT

Je Brinza has experience shepherding a pharmaceutical drug from creation to commercialization. So, when the Hartland resident was introduced to Michigan State University chemistry professor Jetze Tepe, Ph.D., and his research, he wanted to take that ride again.

Brinza and Tepe are partners in Portera erapeutics, a startup headquartered in the Spartan Innovations incubator at the MSU Innovation Center in East Lansing. ey built Portera to study how proteasomes could treat oncology and neurogenerative diseases.

Tepe has long studied proteasomes, the machine in which every cell degrades and recycles amino acids from proteins tagged for removal from the cell.

Now Tepe is working toward building a compound that can alter several disease states and be used as a treatment for cancers and neurological diseases such as Parkinson’s, ALS (also called Lou Gehrig’s disease) and Alzheimer’s.

Global pharmaceutical company AbbVie noticed Tepe’s research and encouraged him to pursue the idea further. Tepe incorporated Portera erapeutics in November 2021 as the chief science o cer and brought Brinza aboard as the company’s executive chairman and second employee a few months later.

Portera erapeutics received an undisclosed amount of seed funding from AbbVie and Red Cedar Ventures, MSU Research Foundation’s venture capital fund.

Odds of commercialization

If Tepe identies the compound they seek, Portera could move into the next steps of the standard pharmaceutical development process, which includes toxicology reporting, an investigational new drug application and eventually multiple drug trial phases.

e odds, though, in the biotech development sector are always long.

“Very few compounds make it all the way through,” Brinza said. “ e failure rate is extremely high, so we know it is a bit of a long shot.”

Statistics vary, but a 2022 article by Storay Amiri for AZO Life Sciences indicates that developing a successful FDA-approved drug requires a 10-to-15-year time frame and costs over $2.6 billion. Even then, 90 percent of developed drugs are unsuccessful.

Brinza said few even get to the clinical trial stage.

See PORTERA on Page 10