Forbes recently interviewed Nazli Azimi, the CEO and co-founder of Bioniz Therapeutics.
Forbes recently interviewed Nazli Azimi, the chief executive officer and co-founder of Bioniz Therapeutics. The company focuses on developing peptide drugs to treat immune-inflammatory diseases and cancer. The company currently has three pipeline programs, with BNZ-1 the furthest along, currently in Phase I clinical trials for T-cell leukemias, including Large Granular Leukemia (LGL) and Cutaneous T-cell Leukemia (CTCL), and for alopecia areata. The other programs are in preclinical development for celiac disease, inflammatory bowel disease and autoimmune disorders. The company has a market valuation of about $400 million.
Azimi, 48, grew up in Iran. Her father was an army officer during the 1979 Iranian Revolution and went into hiding. Azimi was at the university in Iran, but recounts that “We were afraid for our lives. I went to university but I felt totally suffocated. All I heard was I couldn’t do what I wanted because I was a woman.”
She made it to Turkey where the U.S. ambassador helped her get a student visa to the University of Maryland, where she took part in the graduate program in pharmaceutical science. She then took a post-doctoral fellowship at the National Institutes of Health, where she worked on a rare neurological disease, HTLV-associated myelopathy, which is similar to multiple sclerosis. Azimi told Forbes, “My fellowship turned into a job as a research scientist. That got me into the big picture of auto-immune diseases.”
After NIH, she took a job at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center studying immune responses to the herpes virus. She then joined NuGene in Irvine, California as scientific director. In 2008, she launched a skin care company, Dermaheal USA, with a friend. She notes that they sold “high-end moisturizer and eye cream through doctors’ offices, on Amazon and in some stores. We worked out of the garage in my house. It cost us $12 to make 10 ounces and we sold it for close to $100. We were profitable from the beginning. Our revenue was close to $1 million and we had three employees. My goal was to have a revenue stream to start my biotech company.”
Which she did, taking $500,000 of her own money to fund Bioniz for the first three years. She then raised another $500,000 from friends and family before reaching out to other investors. With the current timeline, she expects the company will need to raise $300 to $400 million dollars to run the clinical trials it wants to conduct. For this, she will likely approach the typical big venture firms, although when asked, says, “There are other ways to finance the company. You can say to a pharmaceutical company, I have this drug, come and help me out so I can develop it and promote it. There are different licensing deals. It could be a mixture of venture capital, licensing or a partnership. A pharma company could say, you have the technology, help me develop a drug for lupus.”
On Nov. 2, Bioniz presented data at the 2017 American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting on BNZ-1. One was an abstract from BNZ-1, “Results from a First-in-Human Study with BNZ-1: A Novel Peptide Inhibitor of IL-2, IL-9 and IL-15 for the Treatment of T-Cell Malignancies That Safely and Selectively Decreases Regulatory T-Cells, Natural Killer Cells, and CD8+ Central Memory T-Cells.” The other was “Blockade of IL-2 and IL-15 Gamma Chain Receptor Signaling Decreases Leukemic Cell Viability in T-Cell Large Granular Lymphocyte Leukemia and Adult T-Cell Leukemia.”
The research is led by Bioniz and collaborators at the University of Virginia (UVA) Cancer Center and the National Cancer Institute.
