{"id":36978,"date":"2010-10-21T16:04:42","date_gmt":"2010-10-21T20:04:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/home.bates.edu\/?p=36978"},"modified":"2018-06-04T09:22:31","modified_gmt":"2018-06-04T13:22:31","slug":"kates83","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2010\/10\/21\/kates83\/","title":{"rendered":"R&D chief at pharmaceuticals firm to discuss drug development"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Chemist<\/a><\/p>\n

Steven Kates ’83, vice president of research and development for the Massachusetts pharmaceuticals company Ischemix, visits Bates to offer the presentation Ischemix: Discovery and Development<\/em> at 4:15 p.m. Monday, Nov. 8, in Room 204 of Carnegie Science Hall, 44 Campus Ave.<\/p>\n

Open to the public at no cost, the presentation is sponsored by the chemistry department. For more information, please call 207-786-6294.<\/p>\n

Kates is leading Ischemix’s development of CMX-2043, a drug now in the final stages of testing that is designed to reduce damage to heart tissue that can occur when normal blood flow is restored after a blockage.<\/p>\n

“People don’t realize how many failures there are in this process, and the costs involved in bringing a drug to market,” Kates says. Developing a new drug takes enormous amounts of money and time — it can take 10 years to bring a single drug to market, and estimates of cost range from 100 million to a billion dollars.<\/p>\n

Kates likens the process of developing a therapeutic drug to building a house. “So many disciplines are involved. You need guys who pour the foundation, plumbers, painters, carpenters.<\/p>\n

“Bringing a drug to the field initially requires hard-core chemists and biologists. Then there is work in toxicology and in regulatory issues. Then you start dealing with the physicians and biostatisticians. It’s a plethora of highly skilled people.”<\/p>\n

But outcomes in the pharmaceuticals industry<\/a> are much less certain than in construction. There is no guarantee that a drug candidate will win Food and Drug Administration approval. In 2004, just 8 percent of compounds entering clinical trials were ultimately deemed safe and useful enough by the FDA to be approved for sale.<\/p>\n

Kates has been working on CMX-2043 for six years. A leading chemist and industry expert in peptide design and manufacture, Kates joined Maynard-based Ischemix in October 2003, bringing more than 15 years’ experience in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries.<\/p>\n

He previously served as senior scientist at Surface Logix Inc., a drug development company specializing in the chemical improvement of already-approved drugs and late-stage compounds.<\/p>\n

Kates majored in chemistry at Bates and earned a doctorate in synthetic organic chemistry from Brandeis University. He has written or co-authored more than 100 articles, reviews and patents, and is a visiting professor of chemistry at Brandeis.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A talk at Bates by Steven Kates ’83, vice president of research and development for the Massachusetts pharmaceuticals company Ischemix, visits Bates College to offer the presentation Ischemix: Discovery and Development<\/em> has been rescheduled from Tuesday, Nov. 2, to Monday, Nov. 8. The time and location for the event will be announced.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":148,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"categories":[7,162,217],"tags":[1703,10763,4110,5825],"class_list":["post-36978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alumni","category-health-medicine","category-science-technology","tag-biotechnology","tag-chemistry","tag-healthcare","tag-medicine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36978","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/148"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36978"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36978\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":87448,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36978\/revisions\/87448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}