Mass. pharmacy founder had background in recycling

BOSTON (AP) The pharmacy linked to the nation's deadly outbreak of meningitis is owned by two brothers-in-law who brought different but complementary skills to the venture: One's a pharmacist, the other a risk-taking businessman who made his mark recycling old computers, fishing rope and mattresses.

Now the New England Compounding Center and its practices are under scrutiny as investigators try to determine how a steroid solution supplied by the pharmacy apparently became contaminated with a fungus. The drug has sickened more than 180 people in 12 states, killing 14. Most of the patients had received spinal injections of the steroid for back pain.

NECC was founded in 1998 by Barry Cadden and Gregory Conigliaro as a compounding pharmacy, a laboratory that custom-mixes solution, creams and other medicines in dosages and forms that often are unavailable from pharmaceutical companies.

Cadden, who is married to Conigliaro's sister, Lisa, had the medical know-how behind NECC, earning a pharmacy degree from the University of Rhode Island. In a 2002 newsletter, he wrote that compounding had rebounded, after falling off when pharmaceutical companies began manufacturing drugs in the 1950s and '60s, and could help patients with painful conditions that demand "novel approaches."

Cadden, 45, backed his belief in compounding with a 2005 donation of between $2,500 and $5,000 to the legal defense fund of the International Academy of Compounding Pharmacists. The group wrote in a 2009 brochure: "To continue to champion the cause of pharmacy compounding and contend with entities such as FDA, we must not only be equipped with fighting words, but fighting dollars as well."

Conigliaro, 46, is a Tufts University-educated engineer and a member of the Air National Guard, from which he retired as a lieutenant colonel in 2007. He started Conigliaro Industries in 1991.

The company contended that pretty much anything could be recycled, and it did so in creative ways.

Conigliaro and his father, also an engineer, developed Boston's Best Patch, a pothole-filling mix that included the plastic housing from discarded computers. The company's Plas Crete Wall Blocks combine cement, sand, water and recycled plastic. Conigliaro Industries also boasts that it figured out how to recycle up to 90 percent of a discarded mattress.

And when regulators ordered that lobster traps be fitted with ropes that sink to the bottom so that endangered whales would not become entangled, Conigliaro took the discarded plastic lines and resold them to recycling plants, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

(Cadden's wife is also an entrepreneur, having received a patent in 2002 for a "pillow feeding sleeve" to aid breastfeeding mothers by lifting their babies' heads.)

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Mass. pharmacy founder had background in recycling