Many people worldwide, suffering from anemia, need dietary or medical supplements to increase their iron intake or their body’s absorption of it.

A smaller number of people have the opposite problem — hereditary hemochromatosis, which causes their bodies to absorb and retain too much iron — but there’s not an equally easy supplement to help them.

A University of Kansas researcher who believes he has discovered a drug to prevent iron overload in people with hereditary hemochromatosis has created a startup business to get the pill through clinical trials and, hopefully, to the market where people can use it.

The new company is called Bond Biosciences and the researcher is Cory Berkland, a distinguished professor of pharmaceutical chemistry and also chemical and petroleum engineering at KU.

Over time, excess iron in the body becomes toxic to cells and can lead to organ failure and other symptoms, according to the Iron Disorders Institute.

The current treatment for people with the disorder is, basically, modern-day bloodletting, Berkland said. He said to drain off excess iron, which accumulates and saturates the blood before fanning out into the rest of the body, patients must go and donate blood on a regular basis, for the rest of their lives.

Cory Berkland

Drugs that can be used to diffuse iron overload exist, he said, but they are absorbed throughout the body, have “nasty” side effects and are really designed for other blood disorders instead of for repeated use by people with chronic hereditary hemochromatosis.

Berkland said he applied an engineering mindset to this problem.

“As a person in pharmaceutical chemistry at KU and as an engineer, I’m always looking for the simplest solution I guess,” he said, “and this is one of those diseases where if you just gave people something that would prevent the problem, that seems like a pretty simple solution.”

As the saying goes, Berkland said, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of treatment.”

Berkland’s research focuses on ways to more effectively deliver drugs to their intended treatment targets in the body. His pill is designed to prevent iron absorption in people with hereditary hemochromatosis.

KU colleague Ken Audus, dean of the KU School of Pharmacy, actually has the disorder and must regularly donate blood to manage it.

“This project is particularly exciting to me personally from that perspective,” Audus said, in a news release from KU. “But, more broadly, this development could lead to the development of additional drugs needed in several other clinical situations that prevent the absorption of other metals, as well as safer drugs that may actually remove metals from the body. These could be breakthrough treatments.”

The startup company brings Berkland’s research, KU’s patent for it and investors’ money together. Here’s how the business side of Bond Biosciences works, according to Berkland.

Berkland and other researchers in his lab at KU came up with the invention and disclosed it to the university. KU applied for and owns the patent for it, and licensed it to Bond Biosciences.

Berkland said he and Kansas City area attorney Mike Riley started the company and secured investors from New York. Riley and Russell Ellison from the New York group are Bond Biosciences’ two employees, and Berkland serves in a consulting capacity since he is a KU employee.

Money from the investors will help fund a contract manufacturing organization to make the drug product and do animal testing. Berkland said the goal is to be testing it on people by the end of 2017.

Bond Biosciences also will be able to compete for National Institutes of Health Small Business Innovation Research grants and possibly partner with other companies, Berkland said.

Bond Biosciences’ corporate headquarters is in New York, though much of the preclinical research will continue in Lawrence.

Bond Biosciences is Berkland’s third startup business at KU, he said. According to KU, it’s the university’s 38th active startup company.