An economic development official in South Carolina called George Hampton the other week. They were a little too late: Hampton's company already cut the ribbon on its new headquarters, and it's not located in the Palmetto State.
Hampton is CEO of Currax Pharmaceuticals, which this fall relocated its headquarters to Brentwood from Morristown, New Jersey, just west of New York City.
Currax has 35 employees based in Brentwood and already has outgrown its 12,000-square-foot office. Hampton expects that local headcount to hit 50 soon. If a key smoking-cessation drug takes off, "we could be hundreds and hundreds of people here," he said in an interview.
Currax underlines the trend of companies moving their East or West Coast headquarters to Texas, Tennessee and several other states in the middle of the country. Though health care is Greater Nashville's signature industry, Currax became one of just a few companies in the biotech and pharmaceutical fields that doctor and former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist calls "the big gap" in the region's health care scene.
"The health care services born here are second to none," Hampton said. "We felt like it had the right ecosystem to be successful, and we can probably add to it. That pharmaceutical business is a missing leg of the stool for Nashville. Our hope is Currax becomes a wayfinder for the other companies looking here."
Even while its smoking cessation tablet remains in trials, Currax already is profitable, Hampton said. Investors created Currax in 2019 by combining other businesses — purchasing some products out of bankruptcy and acquiring a California company that gave Currax the weight-loss medication Contrave plus a pipeline of other potential products. Eight months into its existence, the company announced it had generated $70 million of revenue and expected to cross into nine-digit territory in 2020. Hampton declined to disclose an updated revenue figure.
"We're commercial. We're looking for assets that are very close to being commercial, or products already on the market," Hampton said. While Currax employs scientists, he said, "we're not a wet lab with a bunch of physicians running around in white coats."
Who Nashville beat
Currax's leadership weighed North Carolina's Research Triangle, multiple cities in Florida and Atlanta among its options for where to move its headquarters.
Hampton said the Nashville area "very quickly bubbled to the top" and won because it offered the best combination of what he said are the three ingredients to running a successful pharmaceutical company.
The first two he listed were higher-ed institutions committed to research (he cited Vanderbilt University, Lipscomb University and Meharry Medical College by name), and a talent pool ("I don't know any city benefitting more than Nashville from a talent influx"). The final factor was innovation: Hampton said "future pharmaceutical products will come with a digital solution tied to that medicine, designed to help the patient be more successful with their medicine and their journey through disease."
Hampton himself briefly lived in Nashville in the early 2000s with a previous employer before being transferred to California, and later, Chicago. He and his family chose to move back to Nashville, and he was commuting to and from Chicago. "We were here, and I knew about the environment," Hampton said. "But the board won't move the company just because the CEO lives in a certain town."
Top targets: Obesity and smoking
Hampton said Contrave, the weight-loss medication, is Currax's "flagship" and the focus of sizable investment from the company. The company's smoking cessation tablets, named CX-101, target what is the biggest cause of preventable disease and death in the U.S. Currax is seeking the Food and Drug Adminstration's approval for a Phase 3 study.
"There hasn't been a new pharmaceutical product introduced for smoking cessation since 2006," Hampton said. "Think about the innovation that's happened for tobacco since then: Vaping, e-cigarettes — there are thousands of new flavors. Pharma, in my opinion, has kind of abandoned the space. We're super-excited about the difference we can make there."
