In-Silico Drugmaker Highlights Rapid Rx Development at BIO Investor Forum

 BIO Investor Forum meeting October 21, 2015, Parc 55 Hilton Hotel, San Francisco. Cyclica is an emerging biotech firm that invented a therapeutic platform based on technologies. It’s called the Ligand Express (TM). The company is now in a license deal with Johnson & Johnson . They repurposed a pharmaceutical product made in the US. The DoD asked them to weed out 2000 drugs down to 53 and eventually they selected one, Zoloft. It turns out that this drug works against Ebola. The Army’s recent deployment of 3000 people to Africa to set up field hospitals, used Zoloft to treat Ebola patients.

Another example, Procter & Gamble has a drug compound that was causing skin irritation in some people that use their Olay skin cream products. It caused a rash. The company isolated three compounds that cause the issue and then eliminated the compound. 

The company’s vision is to 

•  Cut drug development costs in half
•  FDA to approve their drugs and 
• Be the best tech platform for every doc to do personalized medicine solution in the future. 

The goal is to create an automated platform compared to other in-Silico players. Other in Silico firms look for chemogenic compounds, but this company does it all via Ligands. The company’s business model is mainly to work with big pharmaceutical and nutraceutical projects. 

The platform is like the eBay platform. For example on a project basis they might get $10,000 $20,000 in revenue with this model. The second thing they would do is have a license model in which they would receive $25,000 or more per project. 

Their current prospects include Procter & Gamble, the Department of Defense or other similar types of firms. The CEO’s name is Paul Angelico. He said that they will need $20 million in cash by 2019. They currently seek $9.5 million from VC investors.

Speakers at Biotech Showcase See More Growth for 2015

San Francisco — January 13, 2015. The EBD Group’s Biotech Showcase conference was held at the Park 55 Wyndom hotel in San Francisco.
During lunch time they gave a plenary talk to a group of 300 or so investors. The talk consisted of a panel of about seven people talking about the prospects of biotechnology in the coming year. The bottom line is that this group of people as a group and individually pointed out aspects of what’s going on in biotech today and it’s likely that biotechnology will continue to grow in 2015 at the same pace as it was in 2014. The take away message from this panel session is that these people believe that 2015 will be a another good year for biotechnology companies in the industry in general because the trend tends to look positive. The Q and A: they focused on the exclusivity pricing for biosimilars.

Simple Cancer Biomarkers are Inadequate to Enable Personalized Medicine

It seems that researchers are finding that using single cancer biomarkers to develop companion diagnostics (CDx’s) to be used with future targeted therapeutics is very challenging. An article in the November 15 issue of Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News, called Traversing the Cancer Biomarker Labyrinth, by Kathy Liszewski, is a very interesting read.

Apparently progress in this field has slowed in finding clinically useful biomarkers for diagnostics and making other tests that guide doctors for disease prognosis and prediction. Researchers are using a variety of reductionist technical approaches that range from analysis of certain glycans, key microRNAs, and epigenetic changes, to big data analysis of massive data stores of genomic data to tease out more clues to what is going on in cancers.

Scientists seek to develop early detection blood tests that can detect cancers of interest.  Such a blood test could be considered a ‘liquid biopsy’ and might include a panel of a dozen or more miRNAs that represent a biomarker signature.  An oncologist might one day be enabled to quickly screen certain patients with a blood test that would help them diagnose, stage or predict the potential outcome of a cancer.