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.