Toxins Sought After Exec’s Death

Irvine investigators said Tuesday that they believe hazardous chemicals or biological materials are buried under the home of a drug company executive who apparently committed suicide last week, and they will evacuate the neighborhood to unearth the substances.

Residents within a 300-foot radius of Dr. Larry C. Ford’s Woodbridge home will be asked to temporarily leave their homes during the excavation, and a nearby elementary school will be likely be closed for several days, officials said.

Irvine Police Lt. Sam Allevato said officials don’t believe the material poses an immediate threat to residents, but he said they will seek the evacuations later this week as a safeguard while the materials are removed.

The FBI’s hazardous-materials unit will help, he said.

Allevato said detectives heard about the buried materials during their investigation into the attempted slaying two weeks ago of Ford’s partner, James Patrick Riley, the CEO of Biofem Inc. Police believe Ford killed himself a day after detectives searched his home as part of the case.

Allevato said it is unclear whether the materials are in any way linked to what prosecutors described as an elaborate plot to kill the CEO for financial gain.

“We really don’t know at this point what we have,” Allevato said. “This is a byproduct of what we’ve been investigating.”

Meanwhile, sources close to the company said Tuesday that Biofem Inc. might have had money problems and at least one major disagreement between the two men.

“Until the recent news event, I had never heard of them,” said Harry Lambert, managing director of Innocal, a Costa Mesa venture capital firm with $170 million under management. “Frankly, nobody I know in the industry had ever heard of them.”

Biofem received no venture capital dollars between its founding in 1994 and 1999, according to the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Company officials said last week that Biofem had recently received money from a Connecticut-based private investment fund. However, they refused to disclose the name of the investor or the amount raised.

Biofem attorney Raymond Lee did not return calls Tuesday.

Biofem “raised a little money here and a little money there but didn’t get that $2 million to $3 million that would put them in the viable stature,” said Ed Doyle, an Irvine management consultant who offered informal advice to the company from 1997 to 1999.

In 1998, Biofem was seeking $6 million, telling potential investors that a suppository under development, named Inner Confidence, would protect women from pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases for as long as eight hours without causing yeast infections or vaginal lesions.

It is unclear whether the sales pitch worked, but planned clinical trials for Inner Confidence were delayed, presumably for lack of money. In 1997, the company estimated that it would have to spend at least $5 million on trials for Inner Confidence, which cannot be sold without Food and Drug Administration approval.

Biofem officials said last week that the company would “soon” begin clinical testing, more than two years after originally slated.

With investors pouring money into all things Internet, Biofem, like other small biomedical firms seeking backers, might have simply been a victim of bad timing, said David G. Anast, publisher of the Biomedical Market Newsletter.

“Venture funding for biomed and biotech companies dried up for the last three years,” he said. “Money was going to the Internet and high-tech fields, because those areas appeared to be the quickest opportunity for a fast profit.”

In addition, Biofem’s contraceptive was always a difficult sale, Anast said, because “nine out of 10 investors are men.”

Besides financial problems, the two top executives, who were also the co-founders, may have disagreed over the company’s direction. Ford, the firm’s science director, whom police had considered a possible suspect in a plot to murder Riley, was at odds with Riley over where Biofem was heading, consultant Doyle said. In mid-1999, Riley opposed funding clinical trials in Europe, while Ford favored them, he said.

U.S. companies sometimes do clinical trials abroad, because they can gain approval for their products and begin selling them quicker than they can here, Doyle said. Overseas test data can also be submitted to the FDA for U.S. product approval.

On Feb. 28, Riley was shot in the face outside his Irvine Spectrum office by a masked gunman. Ford apparently committed suicide a day after police searched his home in connection with the shooting of his longtime business partner.

Prosecutors have charged Los Angeles businessman Dino D’Saachs with attempted murder for allegedly driving the unknown gunman to and from the scene of the shooting. D’Saachs, who was a patient of Ford’s, has pleaded not guilty and was being held without bail. Police say Ford may have been the mastermind. Ford’s attorney has said his client is innocent.