Peter Milner - Optivia Biotechnology

Year: 2012

Category: Emerging

Sector: health, pharmaceutical

Co-Founder Optivia Biotechnology, CV Therapeutics, and ARYx Therapeutics Physician and serial entrepreneur, Peter Milner, is the co-founder of Optivia Biotechnology, a private company based in California, which is now recognised as a leader in the emerging field of transporter biology.

Established in 2007, Optivia Biotechnology offers contract services and drug-discovery support to Pharma and Biotechnology companies in understanding how drugs are absorbed, distributed to various organs and then eliminated from the body.

Specifically, Optivia’s unique platform can detect transporter-based, and potentially harmful, drug-drug interactions thereby improving drug safety.

The company has worked closely with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA) to develop a complete suite of cell based assays that are now standard assays in which all new drugs must be tested.

In 1990, Peter co-founded CV Therapeutics (NASDAQ:CVTX), which was acquired by Gilead for $1.5 billion in cash in 2009.

As a member of the senior management team from 1992-1996, he in-licensed and co-invented several successful pharmaceuticals.

In 1997, he co-founded ARYx Therapeutics, a NASDAQ-quoted company that designed soft-drugs which are now in various stages of human clinical testing, and in 2005, was instrumental in the restructure and subsequent merger of his family pharmaceutical company ML Laboratories (MLB.LSE) to form Vectura (VEC.LSE), one of the worlds leading makers of inhaled pharmaceutical products.

A native of Roscrea, county Tipperary, Milner is a former Assistant Professor of Medicine at Washington University in St.

Louis, a Fellow of the American College of Cardiology (FACC), and a board-certified physician and cardiologist.

He serves as Adjunct Clinical Faculty in Cardiology at Stanford University School of Medicine and serves as a board member of the California Healthcare Institute (CHI) where he has been responsible for championing various pieces of legislation, most notably the 2011 Leahy-Smith Patent Reform Act and the 2012 GAIN (Generate Antibiotic Incentives Now) Act.

Services: ?The FDA and EMA currently requires testing at seven or eight of the human body’s major transporters and Optivia was the first to offer all of these transporters as assays to its clients.

Working with financial support from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), Optivia now has a total of 38 transporters available to its clients, which is more than any other provider.

There are at least 500 known transporters in the human body and using its unique platform, Optivia plans to offer hundreds of different transporter assays to its customers.

The resulting information will then allow for precise modelling of how a drug is absorbed and distributed through out the body.

Customers: At least one hundred large, medium, and small pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies through the world.

What is your biggest business achievement? Founding two NASDAQ-quoted US companies (CVTX and ARYX) that brought a number of successful drugs to market and created thousands of jobs in California.

Has your Irish-ness contributed to your success? Yes.

It gave me passion and drive but also a desire for learning and knowledge.

The Irish have a long history of discovery and invention in science: from Boyle in physics, to Stokes and Adams in physiology, and Berkeley in philosophy.

It is inherent in the Irish character to accept change yet to not lose that which is valuable to us.

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