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.

Big Data and Precision Medicine Trending at CHI Tri-Con in SF

Moscone North Hall, Feb. 17, 2015. After walking the halls in the exhibit area at the recent annual CHI Tri-Con event in San Francisco, I discovered that a theme came together after I passed by various booths.

For one thing, the words “precision medicine” seemed to be resonating among those firms that were exhibiting and I asked some of them, “Is that the same thing as “personalized medicine” or “individualized medicine?”” I noted to that person that President Obama had recently made some kind of a speech that was promoting the idea of precision medicine so maybe the time has come for precision medicine to take the spotlight.

In any event I also found that there are other themes there such as big data. It is being used in a number of different biomedical research areas. I stopped by the Illumina booth spoke with the lady there whose name was Kathleen. She said that she had just joined the company about two months ago from Roche where she was involved in the clinical area. She said that her firm is moving into the data management side of their business with a focus on clinical diagnostics and take advantage of the fact that a lot of NexGen sequencing is now being used for clinical types of applications and will be generating lots and lots of data.  So big date is the theme here as well. They’re hoping to sell their systems into the clinic and hospital type settings so that they develop some very useful software systems to make sense of all that data. Data analytics is going to be a big deal.

I walked around and came across another booth that was also telling the story of powerful computer power and big data and that was the guy at Cray Computer that is famous for supercomputers in the past, but today they are using many many computers together as a cluster, a Hadoop and have another one they called SPARK. I’ll have to check out what “Spark” means. It seems to me that quite a lot is happening in the software.

CHI had other usual events that they have at the Exhibit Hall such as a raffle in which an attendee might win some kind of electronic gadget. This part of the event also featured a discussion tables. There were 40 tables that could handle as many as 8 to 10 people.  I noticed that just about every table was filled up in the hall and some of the tables had probably 10 to 15 people there, so they must have had some very popular topics to discuss. Traditionally, this part of the exhibit area has been very popular in past meetings that I’ve attended.

Ebola, Tekmira Pharma, Highlight SF BIO Investor Forum Meeting

San Francisco, The Palace Hotel, BIO Investor Forum meeting, Tues. Oct. 7, 2014. The annual BIO Investor Forum opened its meeting at midday with welcome remarks and a program change that included new information about the urgent subject about healthcare developments in Ebola among other topics. The welcome remarks featured a short discussion with Tekmira Pharmaceuticals’ CEO, Dr. Mark Murray PhD about his firm’s involvement in this fast moving healthcare area. Dr. Murray touched on the fact that Tekmira is working on a promising early stage antiviral drug to treat patients infected by the ebola virus. More details would follow at his afternoon investor talk

Dr. Murray said in his afternoon investor talk that Tekmira Pharmaceuticals uses an RNA interference based therapeutic in their ebola drug development program.  RNA interference (RNAi) is a naturally occurring internal cellular process that shuts down the production of targeted proteins. Dr. Mark Murray also talked about Tekmira’s drug therapy developments in nine clinical programs underway.  He said that Tekmira can trigger RNAi, but needs a delivery technology that uses the LNP-RNAi trigger mechanism.  They are working on the TKM-PLK1, TKM-H8v, TKM-ebola drug programs.  The firm is using the FDA orphan drug rare disease designation for HTG, GSD4 and so on. Their Lipid NanoParticle (LNP) partner, is Anylum, using their ALN-TTR02 platform.

Tekmira has nine products in its clinical pipeline. Dr. Murray said that its lead products include two antiviral programs.  The TKM-HBV is being developed to treat Hepatitis B and is being readied for sometime in 2015. The TKM-Ebola program is in phase 1 clinical testing.  The FDA gave Tekmira a‘Fast track’ designation for the program.  Dr. Murray added that the product formulation gave a very high survival result in animal testing using monkeys.  Tekmira will work with the World Health Organization (WHO) in the West African region for its ebola drug human clinical testing program.

Oncology product programs. The TEK-PLK1 product acts on pololukekine-1, which is found in many tumor types, usually ones linked to poor outcomes.  The tumor types include GI neuroendochrine tumor and adenocortico cancer.

Rare disease program. Hyper trigliceridemia. The condition leads to pancreatitis.  GSD glycogen is a rare condition.

Financials. Tekmira Pharmaceuticals (TKMR) is a public stock company located in Toronto, Canada, is on the NASDAQ stock Exchange and has a $528Million market cap.

Drug Program Status.

• 2014    PLK1 Phase I/II
• 2015    Follow on of clinic activity.

Dr. Murray concluded his talk by saying that for further information go to the company website at ir@tekmira.com.

Several hundred investors and presenting company officials gathered at this year’s BIO Investor Forum meeting for one-on-one partnering meetings, 128 company presentations, plenary informational talks, workshops and networking.