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INDUSTRY SPOTLIGHT › Health & BioPharma 42 Doing Business in Connecticut | 2016 necticut's Health (PITCH) at Yale University — the brainchild of Craig Crews and Dennis Wright — is helping academic research- ers learn how to commercialize the compounds they develop in the search for useful drugs. Coming to market When Connecticut estab- lished the Connecticut Bioscience Innovation Fund, setting aside $200 million for investment over 10 years to stimulate the biosci- ence sector, one objective was to help academics get their ideas out of the labs and into the hands of young startups. While the financial support was great, there was a gap for researchers who needed to get their ideas into the commercial marketplace. "A lot of faculty don't have as much entrepreneurial experience as I do, but they have great science," said Crews, who has launched two biopharma startups, Proteolix Inc. and Arvinas. "ey might need ad- ditional help getting their scientific story to the point where it would be attractive to an investor." Crews, a professor of molecular, cellular, and developmental biology at Yale, and Wright, a professor of medicinal chemistry at the University of Connecticut, success- fully sought a $2 million state grant for the PITCH program. "Now we have resources...to work on those projects that have commercial poten- tial, and make derivatives [different forms of chemical compounds that look promising for further research]," Crews explains. "e goal is to educate our faculty on how to be more entrepreneurial, provide them a way to translate their work in a way they may not be able to, as well as to stimulate the local bio- tech community at the most basic grassroots level. We want to found these companies." "It's one of the most challenging areas to make progress," Wright said. "It's very expen- sive and there is a lot of risk, and these great discoveries don't always become something useful. One of the things we're trying to do with this program is remove some of that risk, come in with the resources, and try to move those projects a little more conceptu- ally down the line. at's going to make it easier for the investors to come in." Insurance innovations As biopharma companies and research- ers like Crews and Wright work to commer- cialize new medical treatments, the health insurance sector is frequently tasked with trying to manage the rising cost of that treat- ment. While the federal Affordable Care Act was intended to foster health insurance com- petition from nonprofit co-operatives, many have failed. However, Connecticut's co-op, HealthyCT, bucked that trend and has been a national example for successfully managing its business in a difficult market. One advantage that Connecticut had over other states' co-ops was the make up of the health insurance market here, according Ken Lalime, CEO at HealthyCT. "e space that co-ops work in is a very different space by market. Some grew very quickly and outstripped their assets," he said. "Connecticut has a very small number of fairly large insurers, so we were walking into a different environment than in, say, Oregon, which had 14 insurance companies. Here we only had three." HealthyCT has taken several steps that, in retrospect, probably helped the co-op avoid the problems that plagued others. "We have been very conservative in how we approach the market," Lalime said. "e first year out, having no historical data, our premium was not necessarily the lowest. erefore, we didn't gain a lot of market share, we only got about three percent mar- ket share the first year." at conservative price point may have Alexion Pharmaceuticals is one of the leaders in the state's biotech industry. The company recently celebrated the grand opening of its new headquarters in New Haven. > Continued from page 37 ' We forged some very good partnerships around the state to continue to grow. ' — Ken LaLime, CeO at HeaLtHyCt PHOTO/ALEXION