Covagen with Mitsubishi Tanabe Pharma Corporation

Covagen has just recently announced a partnership with  Mitsubishi Tanabe Pharma Corporation to develop bispecific Fynomer binders against two target pairs selected by Mitsubishi Tanabe and will be paid EUR 4 million upfront.

Pharma Lemmings

Speaking of mergers and acquisitions, an interesting read on the In Vivo blog about the state of the industry regarding comments by Wall Street analyst Raghuram Selveraju (with additional commentary by Derek Lowe). Big Pharma is facing the patent cliff as their most profitable compounds come out of patent protection. The general story is a shutting down of research at Big Pharma (demonstrated in the thousands of jobs lost in the last few years). With a sense of desperation, it appears Big Pharma intends to fill their pipelines with work from biotech or outsourcing.

The In Vivo blog writes:

That desperation leads to the repetition of familiar mistakes which derive from the predictable thinking of too many business development executives at big pharma, Selveraju opined. First, when looking for licensing opportunities, pharmas very often seek out their comfort zone – a potential product for which they can deploy an existing sales force or promote to doctors they already know and communicate with. Also, to be confident in an experimental drug’s preclinical and clinical data, pharmas often want to go into areas where their competitors also have a compound as well as into validated targets.

The interesting quote to me is the "too many business development executives". I wonder how much of that is true.
The In Vivo blog closes with:

What then is Selveraju’s prescription for better business development practices? It might disappoint those who want pharma to be in the vanguard of innovation. He recommends incremental innovation – using FDA’s 505b2 pathway to develop products with already defined efficacy and safety – as well as biosimilars and re-purposing. Pharma also should focus on niche and specialty indications, and largely eliminate primary care products and the large commercial operations that come with them.

Hmmm, doesn't sound like a plan to cure diseases of the world. I wonder where the innovation will come from then, and who will pay for it?

Addex Therapeutics

Addex Therapeutics, located in Geneva, was founded in 2002 by Vincent Mutel and others when he left Roche (he left Addex in 2011). Addex is focused on finding and developing small molecule drugs which are allosteric and target G-Protein Coupled Receptors, receptor tyrosine kinases and cytokine receptors. Allosteric regulators bind at sites other than the active site of proteins and can both activate or inhibit protein function. To the best of my knowledge (and what they say on the webpage), it is difficult to screen for this kind of interaction.

I can't find very much information about the screens for their allosteric modulators, nothing much comes up in the publications and very little detail is supplied on their webpage. Given that one system looks at a dynamic, direct effect in real-time on the receptor, and that the screen is called ProxyLite, I would hazard a guess in at least one screen they are looking at FRET between two fluorescent proteins or something similar.

They have also developed a compound library which they claim to be biased towards allosteric drugs (as of 2009 it had 70,000 compounds). Addex Therapeutics describes a challenge with developing these drugs is because usually the allosteric binding site is in the transmembrane part of the receptor which requires a type of compound 'greasy' enough to stick to the site, but with good enough (soluble enough) properties to travel in the body to site.

Addex Therapeutics also has several compounds advancing in clinical and preclinical trials, some with their partner Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Their most advanced has finished phase IIa. They also are part of the ubiquitous CTI, just recently receiving a grant together with EPFL and UNIL to develop allosteric modulator therapeutics for neurodegenerative and psychiatric diseases.

Interestingly, Addex went public in 2007 (IPO on the Swiss stock exchange), that's only 5 years after starting up. Usually in biotech the 'exit strategy' for companies is some kind of M&A, mergers and acquisitions with the goal of being bought out by a large pharma company.

Neurix

Neurix is a small start-up company from the University of Geneva located in Geneva in the startup park Eclosion. It was started in 2011 by Prof. Karl-Heinz Krause and Prof. Luc Stoppini

According to the Venture summary sheet -pdf (as of 2011), Neurix has a company size of 2.2 FTE (full time equivalents), so it is very much in the startup phase.

They currently have two funded projects listed on their webpage, a CTI grant in collaboration with the University of Geneva, and they are part of an FP7 project. The FP7 project is called NEURINOX and will be used to screen compounds, and the example they give is NOX. One of the partners in this project is Genkyotex Innovation (a French company owned by the Swiss company Genkyotex) which makes the NOX inhibitors for testing and was also started by Prof. Karl-Heinz Krause in 2006.

Meet the Swiss CRO community - Nov 8th in Bern

An event to meet members of the CRO community organized by the Swiss Biotech association, details on their webpage.

More events organized by Swiss Biotech detailed in their upcoming events pdf.

FGen

FGen is a new start-up created in 2011 and located in Basel, it is a spin-off from the ETH, specifically the D-BSSE department which is in Basel (instead of Zurich with the rest of ETH). FGen is focused on the development of high throughput screens based on the work of (and founded by) Prof. Sven Panke.

The technology of FGen, based on nanoliter reactors, is used for screening assays that FGen develops with collaborators. Based on what I've read in the publications, to make the nanoliter reactors, cells are resuspended in an alginate gel which is separated into beads using a laminar jet break-up encapsulator. Once the cells are isolated into the beads, they can be treated together but held separately (i.e. do PCR by soaking all the beads in the reagents and put them all together in a thermocycler). This is significantly better than other methods where cells are cultured individually in wells (which takes a lot of 96-well plates!). With the beads, there are many different ways to screen described on the FGen webpage and of these I think the buoyancy-difference screen is really cool! Details of the system and screens, including the buoyancy-difference screen are detailed in this ETH dissertation - pdf.

While the company appears to be small and in the 'developing the technology' stage, the associated lab at D-BSSE has a CTI associated success story partnered with DSM Nutritional Products. Together they developed a screen for production of vitamin B2 (read the success story - pdf).