What better way to kick off the new year than with news of a couple of key AmorChem investments converting into full-blown but virtual (for now!) biotech companies?! It's only early January but we are starting the year in the fashion in which we intend to continue, i.e. putting our money and support behind those prior investments that have succeeded in their early endeavours and now merit/need additional help to cross the great divide.
First up, we were delighted to launch Corbin Therapeutics, a new company focused on the USP15 deubiquitinase (DUB) target discovered by Dr. Philippe Gros of McGill University. With a seed financing of $1M in place, the team is now poised to begin screening for small molecule inhibitors of USP15 as novel candidate therapeutics for neuroinflammation, with multiple sclerosis as the primary indication.
There's a lot of buzz in the UB/DUB space in general, with many referring to the them as the next generation of drug targets, in correlation with kinases/phosphatases, but of course specificity is always going to be a key factor in developing inhibitors. USP15 itself is seeing quite a bit of attention in the literature, and seems to play key roles not only in neuroinflammation, but additionally in viral replication/stability as well as in p53 biology and cancer.
This exciting new target's role in inflammation was identified by Dr. Gros and his team in an elegant genome-wide mutagenesis screen in which a single point mutation was sufficient to be protective in various animal models of neuroinflammation. In a recent paper published in Nature Immunology, the team demonstrated that USP15 regulates the type I interferon response and is directly involved in the pathogenesis of neuroinflammation.
Essentially, we see huge potential not only in the USP15 target but also in the team that discovered it, and so we wanted to capture that potential and further nurture it, allowing the program to mature and evolve such that it may become an acquisition target for a larger biotech or big pharma interested in the UB/DUB (and inflammation) space. In fact, given not only the expanding role of USP15 as outlined in recent literature, but also discovery of other targets by Dr. Gros and his team, Corbin is positioning itself as a drug discovery platform. On that note, best of luck to Corbin, the first 2017 spin-off from our AmorChem fund - here's hopiung that we are on the c-usp of something big!
Next up is another spin-out newco, SemaThera, via the pioneering work of Dr. Mike Sapieha of the Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital (HMR). Dr. Sapieha has been working on the involvement of a key new target (SEMA 3A) in diabetic macular edema (DME), and his team have generated a series of ligand-based traps that permit investigation of the roles of both SEMA 3A and VEGF in animal models of disease.
The team has demonstrated that SEMA 3A is linked to vascular leakage that is z hallmark of DME, but importantly, they have shown that the levels of SEMA 3A rise earlier than those of VEGF in disease modeling, which may facilitate earlier intervention in the disease than the current standard of care. This is a most pertinent point in that almost half of all DME patients do not respond well to treatments targeted at VEGF, and thus the targeting of SEMA 3A may provide new hope for those living with the condition.
SemaThera is also the recipient of $1M seed financing from AmorChem, and this financing will permit the company to select a lead candidate for preclinical development, from their bank of SEMA 3A traps. This is a hot target already getting a lot of attention from big pharma, and we believe that a lead trap which has been through preclinical development will be very much on the radar both in terms of pharma partnering and/or acquisition.
When one considers that DME is a very common feature of many retinopathies, and that as many as a quarter of diabetes sufferers exhibit some degree of DME, then the significance of an earlier, targeted therapy is ultra-clear. We wish SemaThera a very happy new year and all our best wishes for an action-packed year with no blurred lines!
Although it may appear that we are reverting back to the older Quebec biotech model that crumbled back in the late 2000s, it's worth noting that we learnt serious lessons from previous failures. These newcos are being seeded by AmorChem to elongate their runway, whilst existing within the confines of a virtual newco that remains housed in founder labs and institutions.
One socioeconomic positive arising from such newcos is that it allows the retention of highly skilled and trained research personnel who become central to the chances of success of our funded projects. So even though we are not creating new infrastructure, we are contributing to maintenance of such jobs and growth of a skilled life science workforce here in Quebec, and that's a very important bonus in our newco strategy.
There will be a degree of both professionalisation and further development within these newcos that should augment their chances of success, and it will be both their ongoing evolution and various market forces that will dictate the outcome. We are fine with that! With these two spin-offs, we are now at #4 from our AmorChem fund, with one major announcement still to come - we have Mperia, Corbin and SemaThera thus far - for more info on the mysterious missing link, watch this space!
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