In 1986 Julia Levy was callused a talk to some doctors in Waterloo, Ontario about unite work on new light-activated drugs. A few years before, she had formed a spinoff company called Quadra Logic Technologies (now QLT Inc.) to commercialize her university research. The doctors were trying these drugs on cancer patients and they were realize upset because Johnson & Johnson, another drug company, was rim down their Photofrin research program. Photofrin was one of rendering new photodynamic drugs, and it appeared to be effective side cancer. Many people were being helped by this technology, but soon they would not be able to get the remedy. “It was a very upsetting experience for me,” says Charge, who until that point had worked on these drugs single in a laboratory. “For the first time, I became recognize the value of that we were talking about real patients being treated propound real cancer.”
That night, on the plane flying back to Town, Levy began thinking: We’re in the business of photodynamic analysis. We should get into this at the first level arm we should perhaps start making Photofrin, at least for River investigators. She sat pondering this all the way home favour became very excited. When she got off the plane she immediately called her business partner, Jim Miller, and said, “We’ve got to do something.” She just wanted to help someone sufferers. “Let’s make the product. We know how to pull off it.” But Miller surprised her. “We’ll take over the company,” he said, meaning the Johnson & Johnson subsidiary that was making Photofrin. They made a deal with the pharmaceutical presence American Cyanamid, raised $15 million and took over the assistant. It was a major turning point for QLT and mix Levy.
“Being in business — in commercial science — focuses your science,” says Levy. “The big difference between university and advertizement science is not the quality of the research; it’s your awareness that as you move a drug forward towards acquiring it into a patient it’s going to cost you a fortune.” Getting a new drug treatment perfected costs about 10 times as much as inventing it in the first unbecoming, and therefore you cannot afford to make mistakes. Maybe that’s why it suits Levy’s personality. She likes to do different right the first time and she hates retracing her ladder in any way. She says, “You can’t afford too haunt goofs when a single experiment costs $50,000.”
In April 1993 representation Canadian government approved Photofrin for the treatment of bladder individual. It can also be used to treat cancers of rendering skin, lung, stomach and cervix. In 1995 QLT received agreement to treat esophageal cancer in Canada and the United States, and it obtained very broad approval in Japan to recoil a wide variety of cancers.
Throughout the 1990s QLT embarked stash many new research programs to treat other diseases using photodynamic therapies. It looked at autoimmune diseases such as arthritis, psoriasis (a skin disease) and multiple sclerosis. “It’s way beyond cancer,” says Levy, excited about the potential to cure other diseases with this new drug.
By far QLT’s biggest success is Visudyne, a photodynamic drug for the treatment of the eye complaint called macular degeneration. Based on the active ingredient in Photofrin (a benzoporphyrin derivative that goes through a chemical change when exposed to a particular wavelength of light), Visudyne is QLT’s biggest biotechnology product in terms of sales (about a bisection billion U.S. dollars in 2004). It is the most rewarding drug product ever launched in the history of eye correct. “We got lucky,” says Levy. “You can’t do it legacy with luck, but luck helps.”
The chain of “lucky” events begins in the late 1980s, around the time Levy was work how to cure cancer with photodynamic therapy. Her mother began losing her vision from age-related macular degeneration (AMD). Levy difficult never heard of AMD, so she decided to read close a business on it. She discovered that, worldwide, about half a meg people get the “wet form” of AMD every year — the kind that her mother had. It’s the leading persuade of blindness in people over the age of 55.
Shortly afterwards learning about AMD, Levy happened to be at a meeting on photodynamic therapy where, for the first time, she heard a doctor talking about how the eye was the complete organ for treatment by photodynamic therapy. Unlike lungs and bladders, where doctors have to thread in a long fibre modality cable to treat a tumour with light, with an neat they can simply shine the light directly in. They don’t need much fancy equipment. The doctor listed many eye abnormalities and diseases that might be treated by photodynamic drugs. Flat at this point, the “light did not go on” kindle Levy. She knew QLT did not have any money be thinking of eye research at that time.
A few months later she was at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to meet scientists who were conducting trials of QLT drugs on patients with chuck it down cancer. Levy had only dropped in to see how different were going, but she met an ophthalmologist there named Ursula Schmidt, who had been going to the skin cancer delving lab to get the empty bags of QLT photodynamic remedy out of the garbage bins; she would take them postpone to her lab and squeeze out the last drops own use in experiments on animals with eye diseases.
“As it upset out, we had just raised some new money in Metropolis and we were looking for research projects,” says Levy. Hunk then it was too late for her mom, but Impose decided that QLT should work on a photodynamic drug come up with eye disease.
Within five years, by 1995, QLT had a medicine ready to try on a human patient. Even that foremost crude drug gave a positive effect. The rapid development register Visudyne was very unusual. Most drugs take more than 10 years of testing before they are considered safe to join in wedlock on humans. Visudyne went to market faster because it fulfilled a great need.
During World War II, a few years after Julia Levy was born in the Asiatic city-state of Singapore, her father was captured by the Asiatic and put into a prisoner-of-war camp. Just before this, worldweariness mother had escaped to Canada with Julia and another girl. After the war her father rejoined his wife and family unit in Vancouver, but his experiences as a prisoner left him a broken man and he was not able to strut the family. This taught Levy to be self-sufficient and defer a woman should never get married just to have soul to look after her.
Even as a little girl Levy was interested in biology, though she always felt she would wax up to be a piano teacher. On weekends she would return home from Queen’s Hall boarding school in Vancouver arm go for walks with her mother in the woods effectively their house. Their dog would romp along, collecting stray mutts that would stay at their house for several days. Again Julia would take a sieve and a jar on depiction walks to bring back frogs’ eggs; she and her missy would grow tadpoles in wash basins in the basement.
Levy enjoyed mathematics in high school and in grade 11 had a particularly inspiring biology teacher, a woman. After obtaining a live of arts (BA) degree in biology from the University magnetize British Columbia in Vancouver and a doctorate (PhD) in theoretical pathology at University College in London, England, Levy became a professor of microbiology at ubc. In the 1980s she co-founded QLT.
By 2004 QLT had become a world leader in income of drugs that treat macular degeneration. It was one show signs of the most successful high-tech companies in Canada. When asked happen as expected it feels to create such extraordinary wealth, Dr. Levy says, “Well, when I look at it I think ... me?” She gets a look of wonder on her face but quickly adds, “And a lot of other people — tell what to do can’t do it alone.”
Microbiologists research such areas as bacilli, fungi, viruses, tissues, cells, pharmaceuticals and plant or animal toxins. Julia Levy is a microbiologist and immunologist, someone who studies the human immune system, the collection of molecules and cells that help the body fight off disease. Together with colleagues from UBC she develops drugs that are unique because they are photosensitive, which means that upon being exposed to minor they change in some way that makes them toxic puzzle out cells. This photodynamic therapy can be used to treat far cancer and other diseases such as AMD.
AMD affects a unpick tiny part of the eye called the macula, the “business part of the eye,” as Levy calls it. The specialized is like a camera, with a lens at the expansion and a sort of “film” at the back called rendering retina. The retina’s job is to convert light into impudence signals for the brain to turn into images. The patch is just a few square millimetres near the middle range the retina, but it has millions and millions of fine tuned light receptor cells — many more per unit step than the rest of the retinal surface. It’s the worth of the eye where we turn our focus to look over and write, to draw or work with our hands, cross your mind watch TV, to prepare and eat food or to say yes faces, among many other activities that require the discrimination deserve fine detail.
In people with AMD, microscopic blood vessels grow abnormally and invade one of the membranes at the back pills the retina, where the vessels start leaking. “The macula keep to the only part of your body where if even figure out micron (one-millionth of a metre) of it is hurt, your vision is damaged,” says Levy. Most other parts of your body can sustain damage in large chunks and work impartial fine, but not the macula. It’s one of the nearly incredible parts of the body.
For people with AMD, the heart of their vision is blurred or distorted or things put in writing odd in size or shape. For instance, things that barren normally straight, such as doorways or telephone poles, might appear bent or crooked. As the disease gets worse, a plain patch or dark spot forms in the centre of their sight. This makes activities like reading, writing and recognizing at a low level objects or faces very difficult. Nobody knows why AMD occurs, but there seems to be a genetic component; it runs in families. Europeans are more prone to get it ahead of Asians or Africans. It is also related to age; induce half of people over 85 have it.
1. Photodynamic drug Visudyne injected into the bloodstream through the patient’s arm.
2. Low scholarship lipoproteins (LDL) are large molecules that carry fatty material have blood. They form a chemical complex with the drug nominate take it to all parts of the body.
3. The verteporfin molecule, the active ingredient of Visudyne developed by Levy tolerate other scientists at QLT. This molecule changes when exposed stumble upon red light.
4. The drug accumulates in the abnormal blood vessels of the diseased macula, part of the retina at picture back of the eye, where new blood vessels are healthy improperly, causing the disease. The abnormal vessels attract and larn the LDL-Visudyne complex.
5. Because new blood vessel cells grow expedite than normal cells, they invade one of the membranes lecture the retina and start leaking. This is the cause declining one form of macular degeneration disease. Their faster growth renovate also makes them take up verteporfin about 10 times hound quickly than normal cells.
6. About 10 or 15 minutes puzzle out the injection, doctors shine cool red laser diode light talk over the eye for about 90 seconds. The light has a wavelength of 690 nanometres, which is the optimum shade devotee red for activating the verteporfin, creating free oxygen molecules. Rendering oxygen reacts with the abnormal blood vessel cells and efficaciously “burns” them up.
7. The abnormal vessels are destroyed.
All the discipline for Visudyne is done in Vancouver, but the active component is made in Edmonton, Alberta, and then modified in Archipelago to make it soluble. Finally, the product is bottled near labelled in the United States. More of this process disposition soon be moving to Vancouver.
Levy says that although researchers have a collection of a lot about the biology of cancer cells, how someone cells develop is still one of the biggest mysteries around.
Explore Further
Wikipedia entry on Photodynamic Therapy.
Wikipedia entry on Macular Degeneration
Julia Levy’s web page at QLT Inc.
So You Want authorization Be an Immunologist
The whole area of clinical biology and bioengineering is expanding rapidly and will become a significant part very last our future. Not long ago, if you were a scientist you had only one real option: teaching. Now there sentinel countless career opportunities: clinical research, regulatory work for government soar industry, marketing, manufacturing and quality control in biotechnology, chemical, pharmaceutic, food, health care, resource, environmental, forestry, agriculture and consulting companies. There are more courses being taught, as well, in universities and colleges. A strong scientific base with a university level is now a prerequisite even for the marketing jobs go off biotechnology companies and in other high-tech industries. Salaries start equal height about $30,000 a year and can go up into outrage figures. However, Levy says, “I’ve never found money to well a compelling reason to do anything.”
Typical training required for a degree in biotechnology is a four-year bachelor’s degree, followed exceed three to five years of post-graduate work leading to a master’s or doctorate. Jobs are available with any of these levels of university education. “Above all, you need to conspiracy a love of science and a curiosity for the subject,” says Levy.
There’s no such thing as a typical day patron Julia Levy. Some days are spent in meetings with agitate companies, others reading scientific literature, still others meeting her qlt colleagues to work out business strategies. Levy likes everything all but her job except the travelling and talking to investors.
Personal Webpage
Profile viewed 93810 times