Professor is UW money tree (Discovery of UV Light:Vitamin D Link)

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Professor is UW money tree

00:00 am 7/17/05
Judy Newman Wisconsin State Journal

Hector DeLuca strikes a contemplative pose in the Biochemistry Building at UW-Madison.
(Craig Schreiner - State Journal)

Hector DeLuca takes pride in his vegetable garden.

"I had a great spinach crop," he boasts, explaining with quiet pleasure how he mixed the dark green leaves with ricotta and spooned it into his handmade ravioli.

It is rare to hear DeLuca, 75, boast, although he is one of UW-Madison's superstars.

DeLuca is an internationally respected expert on vitamin D, and his research is the basis for at least eight drugs - including Hectorol, his namesake - with combined sales estimated at $4 billion to $10 billion.

His discoveries are at the root of three companies that provide a total of about 150 Madison-area jobs.

One of those companies, Deltanoid Pharmaceuticals, has contracts with three drug companies, including a deal with Pfizer valued at more than $42 million to develop a drug that may have the amazing potential to grow new bone cells.

"He's building a company with a very rich pipeline of products," says John Neis, senior partner with the Madison investment firm Venture Investors. "It could have the potential for value well in excess of $1 billion."

With nearly 1,500 patents bearing his name and applications in for 200 more, DeLuca's name is gold for UW-Madison. His patents have brought an estimated $250 million in licensing fees and royalties, "more than all the other inventors combined," says Carl Gulbrandsen, managing director of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.

It's money that helped build two additions onto the Biochemistry Building in the past 20 years.

After leading the biochemistry department for 30 years, DeLuca stepped down from the chairmanship July 1 to lighten his load after being diagnosed with lymphoma. That cuts two to three hours a day of office work but won't stop DeLuca from continuing full time as researcher and professor in addition to his duties as Deltanoid's president and chief executive.

"He is the linchpin" of the biochemistry department, says Michael Sussman, biochemistry professor and director of the UW Biotechnology Center.

DeLuca's impact on the scientific community has been "absolutely outstanding," says Michael Holick, a Ph.D student under DeLuca in the early 1970s and now a vitamin D expert at Boston University.

But DeLuca is also more than that.

He makes time to chat with his coworkers - including his own staff of 28 researchers and scientists - about their children and their lives.

"Even though he's this famous, world-renowned scientist, he really likes to get to know people he's working with on a personal level," says Cheryl Adams Kadera, academic department manager for the biochemistry department.

"He views this department like a family," says biochemistry professor Rick Amasino. While DeLuca is known for an occasional angry outburst, it's always to fight for what he believes is in UW's best interest, Amasino says. "He puts his heart and soul into this department."

"He's a man (who) has an incredible heart," says his wife, colleague and business partner, Margaret Clagett-Dame.

Legacy from parents It is fitting, perhaps, that DeLuca, described by colleagues and clerks as down-to- earth, is as happy digging down in the soil as he is delving for answers to the mysteries of the human body.

It is a legacy from his parents, immigrants from Cosenza, on Italy's southern tip, who made their living coaxing crops from the foothills of southern Colorado near Pueblo and selling their carrots, green beans, lettuce and radishes to truckers who drove them to Wichita, Kansas, and San Antonio.

DeLuca tills the soil on his Kubota tractor, spreads manure and meticulously tends a large garden on his 85-acre farm near Cottage Grove. Like his father, DeLuca ferments his own wine and champagne, buying grapes from California.

He is the family chef, preparing Italian favorites like osso buco as well as Chinese dishes. "I do most of the cooking, but Margaret won't let me bake pies," he says.

He is, at heart, a family man, with a family that encompasses Martin, 7, and Adriana, 5 - his children with Clagett- Dame - as well as two daughters and two sons from his first marriage and their nine children.

Relinquishing the chairmanship will give him more time to spend with family, he says, adding that he's feeling "pretty good" after undergoing four rounds of chemotherapy and one month of radiation treatments at UW hospital.

"So far, the tumor has disappeared," he says. "I feel very confident."

Seventh-grade teacher Family, in fact, drew DeLuca to scientific research. The youngest of five children, two of his brothers died young. One fell victim to diphtheria, before DeLuca was born. The other died when DeLuca was 4 years old, of complications from cancer that was misdiagnosed and incorrectly treated.

The deaths deeply affected DeLuca and his family. "And I wanted to do something about it," DeLuca says.

It was his seventh-grade biology teacher, Mildred Ball, who turned him on to science, he says. "I got so excited about science . . . I wanted to use science to solve problems."

He earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry with honors from the University of Colorado and decided to pursue medical research.

DeLuca could have gone to Harvard or the University of California at Berkeley - both had accepted him. But he was intrigued by research at UW- Madison, especially that of professor Harry Steenbock, who had discovered that vitamin D could be produced from exposure to sunlight and that vitamin D could prevent rickets, a disease that causes bone deformities in children and convulsions.

"Every day, I'd visit that mailbox, hoping I'd get a research assistantship." One day, it came - from Steenbock himself. DeLuca realized "this isn't an offer, this is a command. I accepted immediately."

UW already was a leader in the discovery of vitamins, starting with the "single-grain" experiment in 1911 showing that cows fed only wheat or oats had trouble reproducing. Those crops were missing a nutrient, researchers determined.

It was Steenbock who became DeLuca's teacher and mentor, paving the way for much of DeLuca's success as a scientist and a businessman.

"He was a true visionary," DeLuca says. Steenbock showed in 1923 that irradiation with ultraviolet light increased the vitamin D content of food.

When Quaker Oats offered Steenbock a $1 million contract, he set up an organization that would pump money from UW inventions back into the university. It became WARF, established in 1925, a foundation that's now clinched nearly 1,500 patents on the discoveries of UW-Madison faculty and staff and funneled $750 million back to the university for research.

Thrill of discovery For DeLuca, the thrill is in the discovery.

That includes an early discovery in his lab that vitamin D raises levels of calcium and phosphorus in the blood, affecting skin, bones and the immune system, but has to travel through the liver and kidney to become activated.

Then in 1968 and 1971, DeLuca, collaborator Heinrich Schnoes and their labs isolated an extract of vitamin D, first from animal blood and then from the chopped intestines of 1,600 chickens.

"We were excited," he says. "It was a major new insight into how the body handles calcium and bone."

The results include drugs such as Abbott Labs' Zemplar, used to restore vitamin D in patients with kidney failure to prevent bone loss. A study of 50,000 patients showed those taking Zemplar had a much better survival rate than those who did not. "So you know you're having an impact on health," he says.

Hectorol, a competing product being sold by Bone Care International of Middleton - sold to Genzyme Corp. of Cambridge, Mass., in June for $600 million - was originally designed for osteoporosis.

New modifications in vitamin D, discovered with visiting chemistry professor Rafal Sicinsky of the University of Warsaw, Poland, resulted in 2MD, the drug Pfizer is pursuing that builds new bone in animal tests. It's currently in phase 2 clinical trials; in a year, there may be enough evidence to show if it's safe and effective in humans. DeLuca says he hopes it can prevent hip fractures, injuries that have shortened the lives of many older people.

Another vitamin D-based drug from Deltanoid would be smoothed on the skin to fight psoriasis. QuatRx Pharmaceuticals Co. of Ann Arbor, Mich., started in 2000 by former executives of several major drug companies, licensed that as its first drug to develop.

"We were very impressed with the long pedigree of vitamin D research at the University of Wisconsin. Hector is the current king," says Chief Executive Officer Robert Zerbe.

Two phases of clinical trials show the drug acts "exactly (as) we had hoped and predicted," and it could be on the market by 2010, Zerbe says.

Deltanoid is working on other vitamin D and vitamin A modifications (Clagett-Dame's specialty) that may target juvenile diabetes, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and other ailments.

DeLuca is "inspirational," says Clagett-Dame, a UW- Madison professor of pharmacy and biochemistry. "He has an uncanny way of summing up a problem in a very short period of time. He just knows where to go."

But the road has not always been smooth for DeLuca. He spent a half-dozen years in the 1980s trying to clear his name after a small company intimated his lab had stolen a scientific formula and a federal probe into alleged scientific misdeeds followed.

It was a very difficult period, DeLuca says. The awards stopped, the stream of promising graduate students halted. It took three investigations to put the matter to rest.

"It was an era of witch hunting much like our senator (Joe McCarthy, R-Wis.) did back in the 1950s," he says. "Accusations were made wildly without foundation."

In the end, the issue came down to "mislabeled fractions" in a student's notebook. "We clearly made the compound, and our patent pre-dated theirs," he says.

But it taught him a lesson: "Accusations and gossip - they are the worst things people can perpetrate on each other."

Today, the blemish is gone, and there is "no problem attracting the best and brightest students" to biochemistry, WARF's Gulbrandsen says.

"If you look around at universities around the country that have preeminent biochemistry departments, you'll find that a lot of leaders there trained under Hector," he says.

Holick, professor of medicine, dermatology and physiology at Boston University, is now investigating the possibility that vitamin D deficiency may play a role in colon cancer and other cancers.

"Most cells in your body recognize vitamin D; this is from the early work of Hector DeLuca," Holick says. "The research is blossoming, growing by leaps and bounds. And it's all because of the fundamental concepts that DeLuca initiated."

Contact reporter Judy Newman at jdnewman@madison.com or 252-6156.

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