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.

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).

Polyphor

Founded in 1996, Polyphor is a company in Basel developing drugs only slightly larger than small molecule drugs and their focus is on the disruption of protein-protein interactions. These kinds of interactions are more difficult to disrupt because of the shape of the interaction. Usually, to disrupt an enzyme, you need a small molecule that can slip into the active site. However, protein-protein interactions are typically bigger and may require a larger drug to disrupt. Protein therapeutics such as DARPins and antibodies are good at targeting protein-protein interactions, but their larger size has a cost. It may be difficult to design a drug that can enter cells, cross the blood-brain barrier, or can be taken orally.

Polyphor participates in partnerships with companies to develop their small therapeutics against the clients chosen targets. The most recent annoucement has been a partnership with Boehringer Ingelheim (who recently shut down virology research in Montreal Canada).

Polyphor also develops their own compounds against drug targets and have several in clinical trials, with the most advanced in phase II. They are also clearly moving forward with clinical trails since they have a job posting for a clinical development project manager.

Polyphor has two technologies, MacroFinder and PEMfinder. MacroFinder is a synthetic system to develop libraries of rings, sounds like combinatorial chemistry to me. PEMfiner is based on PEMs, developed by Prof. J. A. Robinson at the University of Zurich (yes, Zurich has not only federal ETH but also their own university). PEMs are cyclic peptides with specific short structural motifs (such as a hairpin turn), and it appears that Prof. Robinson has developed the Pseudomonas aeruginosa inhibitor that is currently in clinical trials at Polyphor. The peptide portion of PEMs can first be developed using phage display, and then the peptide sequence transfered to their synthesis platform. I guess at that point the PEMs are cyclized (and are not cyclized during phage display).

4-antibody

The company 4-Antibody is located in Basel and (as the name suggests) develops antibodies. They have a patented Retrocyte display, which lets them screen full length, native antibodies expressed in pre-B cells. A major advantage of the technology is they have the patent on the system, leaving full freedom to operate (ie no external licensing to be negotiated). 4-Antibody is located in the Technology Park Basel, home to a few companies including the biotech company NBE-Therapeutics. This company was just founded in 2012 by Ulf Grawunder, who was an original co-founder of 4-Antibody and left at the end of 2011.

In addition to their own pipeline, 4-Antibody has both commercial and academic partners and it is with their academic partner, the University of Erlangen in Germany, that they have their most advanced antibody in the pipeline, one against human Cytomegalovirus. Furthermore, 4-Antibody has expanded their discovery opportunities with a collaboration with Evotek announced this year. Together they have combined to offer an integrated antibody discovery and development service for companies that might wish to out-source their antibody discovery.

4-Antibody isn't the only company with a strategy to develop antibodies against targets as a service. GlycoFi (sold to Merck) had a similar strategy but using yeast that have been engineered with a more human glycosylation system. Adimab, another company using yeast display also provides antibodies to a company such as Arsanis.