Biognosys is a proteomics company located in Zurich and founded in 2008 by Dr. Oliver Rinner, Dr. Johan Malström, Dr. Philipp Antoni and Prof. Ruedi Aebersold, so it looks like it was spun out ETH.
Biognosys is looking to make it in the field of personalized medicine, something which is of great interest to pharmaceutical companies. The idea being (in the post-blockbuster world) you find a drug that works best on only a subset of the population. If you test this drug in clinical trials with all possible patients, it may not show significant results, but if you have a subset of responders, you could then market your drug to that smaller subset. So, no big blockbuster, but instead of a rejection you get a drug on the market. Of course, key to this is to identify which population responds to the drug.
Biognosys performs mass spec analysis on protein samples, including identification of modified peptides (for example you could identify protein phosphorylation) and they have complex evaluation software for the interpretation of the massive amount of data generated. To extend the technology past screening for personalized medicine, Biognosys wants to offer a 'protein passport', a yearly screening of your entire blood protein content. This seems like a decent business plan, yearly screening! However, as recently seen in the PSA screening debate, and the older breast-screening debate, over-screening can be a serious problem. Are changes you observe in your blood a natural result of ageing or change in diet or countless other reasons. Good validated markers are hard to find (and quite valuable). However, I think the method could provide interesting data for the characterization of population norms (kind of like the 1000 genome project). Maybe with enough characterization good markers can come out of the research.
Tuesday, November 27, 2012
Wednesday, November 14, 2012
Anergis
Anergis was founded by Professor Francois Spertini (a professor at UNIL, another Lausanne University) in 2001. It is located in the new technology park Biopole, in Lausanne (in the French side of Switzerland). Anergis is developing an improvement on SIT, Specific Immunotherapy. SIT is an allergy treatment that works by developing immune tolerance in the patient through vaccination with increasing doses of the problem allergen. SIT usually takes several years and many vaccinations because the allergen dose must be below a critical threshold where an allergic reaction would be generated.
Anergis is attempting to improve SIT through the use of peptides. Rather than immunizing with the entire protein, they immunize with peptides which cover the length of the entire protein. Anergis claims that with the peptide therapeutic, they do not invoke an allergic response and so can use higher doses of allergen in the therapy. A higher dose makes immune tolerance develop faster and so Anergis claims they can perform SIT within months instead of years. Anergis has just started in phase II of clinical trails for their vaccine developed against Birch.
Anergis is attempting to improve SIT through the use of peptides. Rather than immunizing with the entire protein, they immunize with peptides which cover the length of the entire protein. Anergis claims that with the peptide therapeutic, they do not invoke an allergic response and so can use higher doses of allergen in the therapy. A higher dose makes immune tolerance develop faster and so Anergis claims they can perform SIT within months instead of years. Anergis has just started in phase II of clinical trails for their vaccine developed against Birch.
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
Redbiotec
Redbiotec is a small company located near Zurich spun out from ETH in 2006 by Christian Schaub and Dr. Corinne John and is focused on developing vaccines (currently their pipeline is all preclinical).
Redbiotec develops virus-like particles (VLPs) which are non-replicating and allow surface protein expression, thus making them very useful as vaccines. Redbiotec constructs the VLPs using a co-expression system. Usually when proteins are expressed in the lab a one-promoter one-protein one-plasmid system is used. If you want to express several proteins together you can try to find enough plasmids which are compatible or you can try and put all the proteins into one plasmid. I have done multi-expression before, using a promoter and an IRES sequence in E. coli and it worked very well.
The Redbiotec system is based on the MultiBac system developed at ETH and you can express up to 10 different proteins with specific promoters (doesn't look like a system that utilizes IRES so it could probably be better controlled). It is based on the baculovirus expression system where protein is expressed in insect cells. One thing that isn't really detailed is what exactly goes into the virus like particle. Can the system express membrane bound proteins and are they working on this? Some of the viruses they are developing vaccines for are enveloped.
Redbiotec is funded in part by the venture capitalist group Redalpine. I see that the 3D microculture company InSphero I wrote about earlier is also funded by Redalpine. In addition to their own vaccine pipeline, Redbiotec also partners with other pharma and biotech companies. They describe their work in three general areas, vaccines, using the VLPs to help cancer therapeutics and to develop VLPs that express targets for antibody engineering.
Redbiotec develops virus-like particles (VLPs) which are non-replicating and allow surface protein expression, thus making them very useful as vaccines. Redbiotec constructs the VLPs using a co-expression system. Usually when proteins are expressed in the lab a one-promoter one-protein one-plasmid system is used. If you want to express several proteins together you can try to find enough plasmids which are compatible or you can try and put all the proteins into one plasmid. I have done multi-expression before, using a promoter and an IRES sequence in E. coli and it worked very well.
The Redbiotec system is based on the MultiBac system developed at ETH and you can express up to 10 different proteins with specific promoters (doesn't look like a system that utilizes IRES so it could probably be better controlled). It is based on the baculovirus expression system where protein is expressed in insect cells. One thing that isn't really detailed is what exactly goes into the virus like particle. Can the system express membrane bound proteins and are they working on this? Some of the viruses they are developing vaccines for are enveloped.
Redbiotec is funded in part by the venture capitalist group Redalpine. I see that the 3D microculture company InSphero I wrote about earlier is also funded by Redalpine. In addition to their own vaccine pipeline, Redbiotec also partners with other pharma and biotech companies. They describe their work in three general areas, vaccines, using the VLPs to help cancer therapeutics and to develop VLPs that express targets for antibody engineering.
Thursday, November 1, 2012
Arisgen
A different kind of company this time, Arisgen doesn't develop the drugs, but rather the delivery systems. Arisgen was founded in 2006 by Dr. Paolo Botti and is currently located in the Eclosion incubator near Geneva.
The challenge with peptide and protein drugs is that they usually need to be injected and it can be a challenge to get them to cross the cell membrane. One way to get the peptide or protein to enter the cell is to attach it to a cell penetrating peptide found through work on HIV. There are problems with this method such as uncertainty of the exact mechanism of entry and that this method further increases the size of the drug.
A different method developed by Arisgen is to modify the peptide so making it more soluble and able to cross the epithilium. There are few details on the Arisgen webpage but it appears to be some ... compound that masks the functional groups of the amino acids and then the entire thing is wrapped in a lipid for delivery. They currently claim this technique is in preclinical trails.
In addition to crossing the epithilium, Arisgen has developed another technology to get peptides to cross the cell membrane. As described on their webpage:
The challenge with peptide and protein drugs is that they usually need to be injected and it can be a challenge to get them to cross the cell membrane. One way to get the peptide or protein to enter the cell is to attach it to a cell penetrating peptide found through work on HIV. There are problems with this method such as uncertainty of the exact mechanism of entry and that this method further increases the size of the drug.
A different method developed by Arisgen is to modify the peptide so making it more soluble and able to cross the epithilium. There are few details on the Arisgen webpage but it appears to be some ... compound that masks the functional groups of the amino acids and then the entire thing is wrapped in a lipid for delivery. They currently claim this technique is in preclinical trails.
In addition to crossing the epithilium, Arisgen has developed another technology to get peptides to cross the cell membrane. As described on their webpage:
...the intracellular delivery via reversible attachment of biocompatible polymers and bio-functional moieties to the peptide. Once into the cytosol, the cell’s naturally present esterases release the original active compound.And it also appears that Arisgen also has a CTI grant. CTI appears everywhere with SME's in Switzerland! I wonder how much the CTI increases Switzerland's competitiveness, especially given the strength of the Swiss Franc in recent years and the high cost of labour in Switzerland.
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