An early pioneer in gene-based drugs, Idera finds sudden success in cancer

Last year, Idera Pharmaceuticals shifted focus from autoimmune diseases to cancer, and saw a sudden stock spike after a promising early-stage trial. This year, the company has more than doubled its headcount.

But it's the coming year that will determine whether the Cambridge biotech can maintain its momentum some two decades after it was founded.

Lately, Idera (Nasdaq: IDRA) has resembled a fast-growing startup. In a recent interview at the firm's Central Square labs, co-founder and CEO Sudhir Agrawal described the initial excitement around its genetics-based antisense drug technologies after the company's founding in the 1990s. He also spoke about the subsequent "dark period" that lasted nearly a decade.

Idera has roughly doubled in size to 40 employees this year and now has two drugs in clinical development. Both drugs seek to block a protein that is part of the immune system known as Toll-like receptors, or TLRs, the discovery of which won a Nobel Prize in 2011.

Ironically, it was the existence of TLRs that largely held back the company's antisense approach for years.

Agrawal describes TLRs as similar to a "trained army" to protect against pathenogenic intruders.

"We all use them. If you get flu-like symptoms, or you get chills, it's really coming from foreign pathogens coming into the body, and Toll-like receptors are being activated," he said. "In the case of auto-immune diseases ... They are activating the immune responses all the time."

Paul Zamecnik, who co-founded of Hybridon (Idera's precursor) along with Agrawal, published the first-ever paper describing the antisense approach in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1987. The research described a way to "silence" disease-causing genes using synthetic DNA. That paper inspired the launch of about 10 new biotechs in two years, Agrawal said, and led to a surge in interest in a completely new way of fighting disease at the genetic level.