Christopher Loose: Beating up Bacteria

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Tuesday, 17 August 2010 21:19

Christopher Loose is the founder and chief technology officer of Semprus BioSciences (formerly SteriCoat Corp), a biotechnology start-up developing long-lasting anti-infective coating for medical devices. Loose graduated from Princeton's chemical engineering department before working in ChemE R&D at Merck Research Labs. Loose earned a PhD in chemical engineering at MIT under Professors Greg Stephanopoulos and Bob Langer as a Hertz Fellow. His PhD work formed the basis for Semprus BioSciences, which won entrepreneurship competitions at MIT, Harvard, Oxford, and Cambridge. SteriCoat is venture-backed with 8 full-time employees in Cambridge, MA.

Each year, a million Americans suffer infections related to medical devices such as the intravenous lines that deliver chemotherapy and liquid nutrition. Adding slow-release antibiotic coatings to the devices helps prevent such infections, but the coatings become inactive when all the drugs have been released, and bacteria can become resistant to them.

As a graduate student at MIT, Christopher Loose created a design tool to optimize formulations of naturally occurring antibiotics called antimicrobial peptides (AMPs), and developed a way to use them in medical devices. Found in bacteria, human sweat, and plants, these short proteins puncture bacteria like balloons. The mechanism is nonspecific, so microbes have trouble developing resistance to the peptides.

But AMPs are too expensive for routine oral or intravenous use. So Loose incorporated optimized peptides into coatings for medical devices, which are effective with a small amount of peptide. When bacteria approach a hip implant or catheter coated with the peptides, they "see a bed of nails," says Loose. The coating doesn't release the drugs the way typical antibacterial coatings do, so its activity is potentially permanent. Loose founded SteriCoat to commercialize the technology and is currently its chief technology officer; the company is testing coated intravenous lines in animals and hopes to bring them to market in 2011.

About Semprus BioSciences:

Semprus BioSciences is a venture-backed biotechnology company developing functional surfaces to prevent medical device complications. Our initial product development efforts are focused on the first implantable and permanently antimicrobial surface technology. The intellectual property comes from the MIT labs of Prof. Robert Langer and Prof. Greg Stephanopoulos, and part of this scientific research was featured in Nature.

The company targets both purchasers and the medical user:

Our value proposition to purchasers is to reduce the likelihood of medical device complications, the costs of which usually comes out of a hospital's bottom line.
Our value proposition to medical users is to improve patient health and reduce liability without requiring a change in practices.

The company's Chairman is Scott Rocklage, PhD, who is a partner at 5AM Ventures. Dr. Rocklage was the co-founder and CEO of Cubist Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: CBST). This Cambridge, MA firm is headquartered in Kendall Square and has twelve full-time employees.