Wisbusiness: The Podcast

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: the Podcast” is with Doug Stafford, president and CEO of Pantherics Inc., a Milwaukee startup developing a pill-based alternative to treat asthma. His company spun out of research from UW-Milwaukee, focused on ways to treat various inflammatory diseases of smooth muscles, including asthma, irritable bowel syndrome and other conditions. “In asthma, there’s inflammation in the lung, and as a result of the inflammation, the muscle in the airways contract and that’s responsible for the difficulty breathing,” he said. “But it’s not just in the lung — there are other conditions in other organs in the body that have a similar disease process.” Stafford, who’s also the director for the Milwaukee Institute for Drug Discovery, explained his company is approaching the problem with a platform technology to create new drugs for various inflammatory diseases. “The current treatments, even in asthma, are unsatisfactory in many different ways,” he said. “Drugs are either not very