Pharmaceutical Company Looks to Expand Business

BRISTOL, Va. – Tired of sending jobs outside the area, the owner of a local pharmaceutical company said Wednesday he’s looking to expand his business.
Innovative Technologies President Keith Latham said whenever the company finishes developing one of its new drugs, it sells the product to a larger business that handles the manufacturing and marketing operations.

“I can’t do that any more,” Latham said Wednesday.

Now ready to change that business model, Latham said outsourcing those functions means the region misses out on what could be billions of dollars in revenue and hundreds of new jobs.

Latham talked about his business expansion options Wednesday while giving a group of Castlewood High School seniors a tour of his facility. All of these students were taking advanced-level science classes and were interested in a medical career, said the group’s chemistry teacher, Jane Carter.

Drug companies can spend at least 10 years and millions of dollars developing new drugs and testing them on human and animal subjects, Latham said as he explained what goes into his company’s work.

That investment befuddled many of Carter’s students, who questioned how drug companies end up making money, especially after Latham said only five out of every 100 drugs that start pre-clinical trials ends up going to market.

Latham answered those questions by telling the students his motivation comes from a desire to cure diseases by personal emotions rather to make a profit.

“The Holy Grail for me is not to retire in the Bahamas, it’s to cure Parkinson’s Disease,” Latham said, adding that his wife suffers from that debilitating condition and he would love to be able to cure her with one of his drugs.

Toward this end, Latham said, Innovative Technologies is working on Parkonil, a drug he claims can cure Parkinson’s disease in laboratory rats. The drug is currently in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s investigational new drug application process. Once that part of the application process is complete, Latham said, the company can start testing Parkonil in human subjects.
Innovative Technologies also is focused on developing Blue-T, a drug Latham said will make it easier to find potential breast cancer tumors and ThyroMax, which is being developed to help people with a thyroid condition.

Both of those drugs were featured on Latham’s tour of the facility.

He showed Carter’s students the machines he uses to make and bottle ThyroMax tablets and some X-rays of rats he’s been using to test Blue-T.
“It’s remarkable, there’s a whole mix of things going on here,” said Katlin Wohlford, one of Carter’s students who specifically expressed an interest in becoming a pharmacist.

Latham ended what he called the “29-cent-tour” of his facility by telling Carter he’d be happy to show more of her students around the place at a later date.
“He’s just really interested in these kids,” Carter said, adding she’d love to bring by another group of students on a similar tour.

The whole idea of the tour, Latham said, was to show students some of the opportunities awaiting them if they decided to pursue a career in the sciences.
“The more you see at this stage in your lives, the more opportunities you’ll have at a later date,” Latham told the students.

Though his plans are still in their preliminary phases and at least one year out, Latham said a similar philosophy was behind his desire to expand his company, so it could handle its drug manufacturing and marketing processes in-house.

Keeping Innovative Technology’s expansion and the jobs that could come with it in the Mountain Empire would give the region that housed the company and helped it grow a chance to benefit from its success, Latham said.
“The economic recovery starts here,” Latham said with a tone that almost challenged other businesses in the area to take the same kind of steps.

gmclean@bristolnews.com | (276) 645-2518