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Published in U.S. 1 Newspaper on June 21, 2000. All rights
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Life in the Fast Lane
Edward Quilty has resigned as president, CEO, and board
chairman of Carnegie Center-based Palatin Technologies to devote his
efforts to Derma Sciences, where he remains as CEO. Palatin’s chief
product, LeuTech, a diagnostic system that can locate infections,
could be on the market as early as the end of 2000. Its first
application
is to use radioactive antibodies to diagnose appendicitis, and the
FDA accepted the system for full review earlier this year (U.S. 1
March 22, 2000). Carl Spana, the executive vice president and chief
technology officer, is the interim CEO and president, and Steve Wills
stays in place as CFO.
Wills is also president of Alexander Road-based Golomb, Wills &
Company,
an accounting firm, and Spana is formerly an immunology researcher
at Bristol-Myers Squibb. Charles Putnam, formerly vice president of
Life Medical Sciences, is Palatin’s COO.
Palatin trades on the AMEX under symbol PTN, and the stock has swung
from a high above $7 to a low just over $2; it is trading at $7 plus
now. Quilty was said to be considering an equity offering last March,
shortly after he made a move that drew some criticism — canceling
a stock swap merger with San Diego-based Molecular Biosystems.
“From where Palatin is today, someone with a different skill set,
with more of a scientific background, would be better to lead the
company,” says Quilty, “and that’s OK. I did what needed to
be done in the period of time I was there.” He owns just short
of 700,000 shares or about seven percent of Palatin.
Derma Sciences is a $11 million revenues wound-care company. Founded
by a registered nurse in a town near Scranton, Pennsylvania, Derma
Sciences offers a full range of wound management and skin care
products.
It has a manufacturing facility in St. Louis for skin care products,
and the wound care and wound closure products are manufactured on
contract. Until now Quilty left day-to-day operations to his chief
operating officer, Richard Mink, who has left the company.
“Derma Sciences has a solid core sales base and with better
expense
control and a little more attention to every aspect of the business,
and finding new avenues to promote our products, I expect to see some
dramatic change in results in the next several months,” says
Quilty.
The stock is trading at just over $2.
Palatin — a made-up name meant to sound sufficiently generic to
encompass a variety of technologies and products — started out
in 1995 as a shell company that could be used to acquire interesting
technologies. Now Palatin has its administrative headquarters at the
Carnegie Center and accomplishes its lab work in Edison.
Palatin’s leading technology develops chemical agents that, when
introduced
into the body, help imaging machines to see an ever-wider array of
soft tissues implicated in conditions ranging from cancer to
infections
to cardiovascular disease. A major site of infection, like an inflamed
appendix, shows up brightly on an image taken with the gamma camera,
enabling doctors to determine quite easily whether a patient has
appendicitis
or not. Other possible uses are to trace osteomyelitis (a bacterial
infection of the bone and bone marrow), ulcerative colitis and
abdominal
and other abscesses, including bone abscesses commonly suffered by
people with prostheses.
Other Palatin acquisitions have brought the company such technologies
as a nasal spray for erectile dysfunction now in development, and
MIDAS, a proprietary peptide chemistry technology that might help
develop a drug for obesity. The company posted a net loss of slightly
more than $12 million in the year to June 30, 1999, and revenues of
slightly more than $600,000.
A Yonkers native with an undergraduate degree from Southern Missouri
University and an MBA from Ohio University, Quilty worked at Baxter,
a large diversified health products company, and at an infusion
therapy
company called McGaw before coming to Princeton to oversee the IPO
of Life Medical Sciences in 1992. Then he joined MedChem and brought
along a wound-care product called SureClosure from Life Medical, and
he promptly sold the company at what he calls “a healthy
profit.”
Quilty then branched out in two directions: into Palatin Technologies
on one hand and on the other hand into Derma Sciences. “I believe
both of these companies will be successes, and I am counting on
it,”
he says.
Palatin Technologies Inc. (PTN), 103 CarnegieCenter,Suite 200, Princeton 08540. Carl Spana, interim CEO and president.609-520-1911; fax, 609-452-0880. Home page: www.palatin.com.Derma Sciences Inc. (DSCI), 214 Carnegie Center,Suite 100, Princeton 08540. Edward J. Quilty, CEO. 609-514-4744; fax,609-514-0502. Home page: www.dermasciences.com.Next StoryCorrections or additions?This page is published by PrincetonInfo.com— the web site for U.S. 1 Newspaper in Princeton, New Jersey.
