Far from the high tech research centers, a central New York company opens a research center Monday focused on its flagship product and on a line of stem cells it is growing for researchers to use. The flagship product is a first-of-its-kind way for researchers to test drugs on cells in a way that exactly mimics the conditions inside the human body.
The company is called BioSpherix and it is located, incredibly, in the village of Parish in rural Oswego County. Parish is a village of about 450 people in a town of about 2,000. It boasts one pizza shop, one restaurant and a handful of solo service businesses. Its largest employer for many years was the elementary school, but the Altmar-Parish-Williamstown school district closed it in 2012.
That building is once again the village’s latest employer as the international home of BioSpherix.
CEO Syed Ahmed Mustafa laughed when asked about coming to Parish.
"Actually finding it was a challenge, just to be quite frank, because GPS doesn't give you good directions.”
Mustafa drives three and a half hours a day to commute to Parish from his home in the Rochester area. He’s been brought in by the investors who bought the company from its founder a couple of years ago, one of many companies in various industries that he has headed.
The company was founded by Randy Yerdon, a laboratory technician working in Rochester when he created sensors that could detect the level of oxygen in a testing chamber. Demand for the tool caused him to start a company out of his home in Oswego County, which he sold to a company with a small portfolio of firms that specialize in controlled environments for research and manufacturing.
The company’s game-changing product is called Xvivo. It does something, according to Mustafa, that no similar product can do. It can simulate the exact body temperature and oxygen level inside the human body so tests of drugs and other treatments on stem cells will exactly replicate how the treatment would work on a live human.
“There's approximately 20% of oxygen in the environment, but your cells only use, on average, about 4%,” Mustafa said. ”Your cardiac cells may use a little bit more. Cancer cells use virtually none. Cartilage cells use almost none. And so if you were doing work on a cancer tumor drug, it makes absolutely no sense to be doing it in room air and at room temperature when it's really at 36 degrees Centigrade and almost no oxygen in the body. And that's what we do here.”
A handful of Xvivo systems are in use around the world, including at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, where it allowed Dr. Nidheesh Dadheech to jumpstart research on a plan to infuse cells into the bodies of diabetics to stimulate the body to make more insulin.
“The machine is a system that allows us to grow these cells artificially, outside the human body, giving the same environment, same temperature, same pressure, same oxygen,” Dadheech said. “So we can actually precisely control the development and the growth patterns of these cells.”
“We have one in New York City at the Tisch Institute that's working to cure multiple sclerosis,” Mustafa said. “We have one in Australia that is addressing pancreatitis and other pancreatic-based illnesses. We have numerous doctors that are working on solid tumor cancers and blood cancers.”
In the Parish facility, BioSpherix is using its Xvivo system to grow bone marrow stem cells that have never been exposed to ambient air. Monday’s grand opening of its Center for Cytocentric Technology and the opening of a sister center in North Carolina marks a new phase for the company. Mustafa said the company is inviting researchers to come to Parish to run tests using their in-house Xvivo and their stem cells to stimulate not just sales of Xvivos but also to speed innovation to improve human health.
The facility has also opened its doors to educators. On a recent day, teachers from around central New York spent the day at BioSpherix to learn about the technology and brainstorm ways to excite their students about the opportunities available in their backyards.
Fulton city school district teacher Kelly Stadtmiller said it’s a goal of the district to get kids to invest in their community so “they can make a big difference without leaving home. Maybe they leave the city of Fulton, but they don't have to leave Central New York to make a big difference in the world, so I'm really excited to share that with our students.”
“Kids are looking more nowadays for things that they're passionate about,” said Phil Fargo, a teacher at Corcoran High School in Syracuse. “Things that they actually want to do. So we find the ways that these industries are different from each other and use that as a marketing piece so that we can incorporate and get kids with diverse skill sets to get into the workforce.”
The Xvivo and a modular plastic and steel enclosure create a sterile clean room environment at a fraction of the cost of what Upstate’s Dadheech estimated is the $20 million cost to build a traditional clean room, which he said leaves more money for research.
The Parish headquarters is far from the tech hotspots of Boston, North Carolina, Texas and California, Mustafa said, but “we've got 22 acres of land. We're in a town where the operating cost is relatively low, the labor cost is relatively low, the utilities are relatively low, so let's make the most of it.
“You can either complain about that, you can move, which would probably bankrupt us in a minute, or you can say let's bring the people here, and that's what I'm trying to do.”