You never know what you'll find en route to looking for something else.

Just ask Michael Long, founder and CEO of Velcura Therapeutics Inc. in Ann Arbor, which is working on exciting cures for some seriously terrible bone diseases.

Long was a St. Clair Shores native who got three degrees from Wayne State University, culminating with a Ph.D. in 1979. He aimed to be a cancer researcher, and wound up with a post-doc at Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.

Long was working on leukemia. And he noted that "there's an intimate relationship between the bone that creates blood cells and the bone that surrounds it." Long said that his research led to some discoveries that "made us able to grow bone in a tissue culture dish. Nobody had been able to do that before."

Long continued his work in the laboratories of the University of Michigan, and said he started thinking about starting his own company perhaps eight years ago.

He said he still vividly recalls the day in 2001 when "one of my trainees said, you have to come see this. There was a little what looked like a crystal growing in this three-dimensional aggregate of bone cells. It took us about two years to prove that we really had grown bone."

But the discovery led to the formation of Velcura in 2001. The company won the initial Great Lakes Entrepreneur's Quest, and its $60,000 prize, that year. In 2002, the company got $3.3 million from the Michigan Life Sciences Corridor to continue its work. The company is currently seeking private financing, which Long said is a challenge.

The trick of getting bone to grow, Long said, is to produce a medium that allows the bone to grow in three dimensions, instead of the usual flat-surface culture used to grow cells.

Velcura has four patents now and nine more pending. But Long said the company is still some years away from putting products on the market. "The research and development pipeline for a drug takes 12-15 years and costs $800 million," he said. "So as we come up with a drug or a compound candidate, will will probably partner it out" to a major drug company, while continuing to receive royalty income.

Velcura's products are being tested for use in curing osteoporosis; to speed repair of serious bone factures; to cure periodontal disease; and to build up bone in patients suffering from some particularly horrible types of bone cancer, in which bone is slowly eaten away by tumors.