IT HAS TAKEN OUT OF THE LAST 50% OF A JOINT-VENTURE THAT THE TWO COMPANIES HAD FROM DOMPÈ AND NOW IT IS EXPANDING PERSONNEL, ACTIVITIES AND RESEARCH IN OUR COUNTRY. THE SCANGOS CEO: "WE DON'T WANT TO MISS THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE HIGHEST SCIENTIFIC LEVEL OF YOUR SPECIALIZED INSTITUTIONS"
Eugenio Occorsio
Milan George Scangos, CEO of Biogen Idec since June 2010, doesn't often give interviews, but he willingly comes to Italy. «Your country is one of the few to combine a large market, of fundamental importance for a multinational group like ours, and a capacity for scientific research of the highest order», he explains to us in a sitting room of the Starhotel in piazza Fontana where he is meeting , researchers and executives of the Italian branch. «We have collaborative relationships with dozens of leading doctors and researchers. Among the many, the neurologist Massimo Filippi of the San Raffaele in Milan, a world-class master in the diagnosis of multiple sclerosis with nuclear magnetic resonance, or Professor Carlo Pozzilli of the Sant'Andrea di Rona hospital, the Italian center participating in the study clinical trial in Italy for BG-12, our next oral drug against the same pathology». It will be a drug, Scangos explains, "which is currently being examined by both the American FDA and the European EMA and which we plan to place on the market within the next year, endowed with relevant characteristics: in addition to ease of administration, oral instead of an injection, there is a very low risk profile because it is based on a molecule, our patented dimethyl fumarate, already used for psoriasis». This of multiple sclerosis is the sector on which the group focuses more than any other for our country. And there is a reason: «In the world – explains Scangos – there are three million people affected by this very serious and disabling neurological disease, 400,000 of which in Europe. And in the European panorama, Italy is identified as one of the areas with the highest incidence with an average of five new diagnoses a day". The group headed by Scangos was born in 2003 from the merger of two important American biotech companies, Biogen of Massachusetts and the Californian Idec Pharmaceutical Corporation. The first was in turn one of the groups with the longest tradition behind it in medical biotechnology, created in 1978 on the initiative of a group of biologists including the two future Nobel prize winners Walter Gilbert (he would have won it in 1980 for chemistry) and Phillip Sharp, awarded in 1993. Biogen had been among the first to develop drugs with genetic engineering techniques: this pioneering work on recombinant proteins led in the 1980s to the development of once-weekly "interferon ß 1a", still today one of the therapies
