Swiss Venture Capital report for 2013

Probably old new by now, but interesting is the Swiss Venture Capital Report for 2013.

Covagen with Conjugated antibodies

Well, it's been a while since I've written about Covagen, and I see they have two conjugations of antibodies with Fynomers (FynomAbs) in clinical trials already, and it looks like this is with their partner Mitsubishi Tanabe Pharma Corp.

The conjugation makes sense, the molecular weight of the Fynomers would probably mean they don't around long enough in the body to be clinical useful, but an antibody conjugate can take advantage of the bodies antibody recycling systems and thus stick around longer. This is probably also an approach that will be strongly considered by the other alternative scaffold company Molecular Partners (and yes indeed, here are their notes only they are selling DARPins as a tag to increase the half-life of other molecules by targeting the DARPin to serum proteins or as fusion proteins).

I wonder if Fynomers will show up as a drug on its own, without the antibody conjugation. That is the promise after all of alternative scaffolds, antibody-like specificity but cheaper and easier to make. Right now the most successful approach appears to be making bispecific antibodies.

Biocartis

Biocartis is a molecular- and immuno-diagnostics company developing a diagnostics platform. Their are targeting personalized medicine and are developing instruments that look like they can be deployed in both a clinical and diagnostics setting (i.e. a big lab where the samples for analysis are sent to, or right in the doctors office while you wait). They are headquartered in Lausanne, one founder is from EPFL, they were founded in 2007 and they have two subsidiaries in Belgium and the Netherlands.

There are two products described on their webpage, a multiplexing platform is based on DNA/RNA and one that looks to be further behind in development which can also do immunoassays (and appears to be a microfluidics instrument).

In 2011 they report having a small scale production facility up and running and state that they are developing a high volume construction line. Given the large recruiting going on at the Belgium location, it appears they are fairly advanced in test development since they are recruiting people who can look after logistics of test production. And oops, their operational planner job description went up so fast they left some notes in:

• (CGAB : too much duplication : comes back in tasks and Competencies)Strong communication skills to communicate both internally and with customer and suppliers.
• Familiar with Good Warehousing & Material Flow practices in a regulated environment with specific cleanliness and shelf-life requirements
• Capability to establish KPIs internally and with each supplier and monitor performance on a defined frequency.  (CGAB : is already mentioned in the task list)

I wonder who is CGAB...

From the reading of the web, I believe Biocartis is most advanced in developing a test to rapidly evaluate sepsis based on an existing test - SeptiCyte, used in the Australian market. With collaborators (Immunexpress - the original SeptiCyte test developers and Debiopharm) they will adapt the test to their instruments and pass FDA approval (maybe with a commercial launch in 2016?). At least with a validated biomarkers test they won't have to validate the test as well as prove the instrument.

2013 innovation index

This year Switzerland tops the list of innovative countries. Cornell University, INSEAD, and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) analyzed 142 different countries using 84 indicators looking at both innovation capabilities (i.e. top universities, access to finance) and measurable results (i.e. patents and publications). Netherlands places 4th, Canada just misses the top 10 at 11th and USA behind Sweden (2nd) and the UK (3rd) at 5th.

ChromaCon

ChromaCon is a company located in Zurich which appears to be spun out from the ETH (at least, one of the patents was filed by ETH, the MCSGP technology). They are developing chromatography equipment which maximizes yield by re-purifying less pure side fractions (those tails on your chromatography peak). The system has a high throughput, with their smallest instrument producing up to 20 g/day.

ChromaCon also has a sister company, Separicon, which uses the same technology for non-regulated industries (like food processing or chemical purification).

I see that ChromaCon is involved in an FP7 project, Optico which seeks to increase productivity at chemical and pharmaceutical plants. They also have worked with/been funded by Venturelab (a part of KTI/CTI - showing up once again).

News about Addex

The In the Pipeline blog references an article about Addex Therapeutics changing focus to their clinical pipeline. More details on their press release. I've talked about Addex before, they are located close to Geneva and are developing allosteric modulators as drugs. One thing they talk about is reducing their cost structure including layoffs in their early development stage.

Evolva

Evolva is a public company outside of Basel and they work on generating new biosynthetic pathways in yeast. According to the wikipedia page, they originated from a company called Phytera from the United States, eventually ending up in Switzerland and renamed as Evolva.

The technology of Evolva is based on biosynthetic pathways in yeast. They use artificial chromosomes to introduce new genes and pathways from other organisms into yeast in an effort to generate either novel pathways or to recapitulate biosynthetic pathways.

Evolva has (apparently) recently changed strategies to developing ingredients from a more pharma-based strategy. The have two compounds now in a legacy section on their webpage that have entered clinical trials. Evolva states that they are looking partners to continue to develop these products but they are also still presenting results at conferences in 2013. As for ingredients, they list several on their product page including vanilla and saffron. They also list Resveratrol, I wonder how that goes after the fraud reported last year. Evolva is also a partner in CHEM21, a European initiative for green chemistry funded by IMI.