Investment and licensing opportunities
Systems biology drug design specialist e-Therapeutics Ltd, a spin-out from Newcastle University, United Kingdom, is to float on the Alternative Investment Market (AIM) in London, raising between £3 million and £5 million for early-stage clinical development of five compounds in its pipeline.
The company represents one of the first commercial outputs of grid computing programmes, which have received large amounts of public money, both at a national and European level. Malcolm Young, CEO, said the technology platform had received £10 million of funding when was under development at the university. The company has raised a £ GBP4 million since its formation.
Unlike high throughput in silico screening in which a large number of compounds are screened against a single protein structure, e-Therapeutics’ system predicts the biological effects of interactions of compounds with one or many proteins, thereby enabling it to quickly identify drug candidates and also their likely side effects.
“There is barely a drug in the formulary that only works on one target,” said Young. “With the lock and key approach it may be that the other interactions don’t matter. But some of the time they do.”
The platform can be used to discover new drug compounds and to find alternative indications for marketed compounds or combinations of compounds. It could also be used to predict if there are likely to be side effects caused by interactions of prescribed drugs. The platform has been validated by using it to identify drugs that are known to have an affect in a particular disease.
e-Therapeutics’ portfolio includes treatments for asthma, depression, malignant melanoma, atherosclerosis and a broad spectrum antibiotic, effective against drug resistant Staphylococcus aureus and Clostridium difficile.
The company is in licensing negotiations with a number of pharmaceutical companies and Young said there is already substantial interest in licensing these early stage products.
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