Rhenovia Aims To Boost Biosimulation Use In CNS R&D
This article was originally published in Pharmaceutical Approvals Monthly
Executive Summary
France's Rhenovia Pharma will recruit talent in the U.S. and Europe and offer its biosimulation techniques for use in developing drugs that target CNS disease, a previously difficult area for computer modeling.
Using computer modeling and algorithms to help develop new drugs for central nervous system diseases is rare. But the quietly growing French biotech Rhenovia Pharma SAS is building on pioneering work conducted at the University of Southern California with the aim of leading the field.
Rhenovia was set up in 2007 and raised €350,000 ($460,000) in 2009 in a first seed financing round [See Deal]. It is now preparing for a second financing round, of around €2.5 million, to enable it to consolidate its financial structure, hire senior staff, and enter into partnerships and collaborations with other companies.
Rhenovia’s hopes to improve the dismal attrition rate for CNS drugs with computer models that simulate the complex biology of the normal brain and pathological CNS conditions to predict effects of potential drugs or combinations of drugs.
The funding will support the growth of Rhenovia's French research facilities by 20 employees and expand its U.S. subsidiary in Cambridge, Mass. by around 20 employees. The company's technology also will be optimized to support the CNS research efforts of pharma and biotech companies.
“Very few other companies have applied systems biology or modeling approach to CNS diseases, because of the complexity of the biological systems in the brain and the multifactorial nature of CNS diseases,” Rhenovia's President and CEO Serge Bischoff said in an interview.
One of the few competing companies also offering CNS biosimulation services is U.S.-based In Silico Biosciences Inc, which was set up in 2002 in Lexington, Mass. There are also companies pursuing computational and complex systems insights to discover and develop new drugs, such as the U.K.-based e-Therapeutics PLC (Also see "e-Therapeutics Explores Network Pharmacology For Drug Discovery, Moves First Of Its Drugs Into Clinical Studies" - Pink Sheet, 5 Jul, 2012.).
“It is an illusion to think that one can get rid of a complex disease like Alzheimer's by just targeting a single site in the brain,” Bischoff said.
This view has been borne out by the success rate of drugs developed for CNS diseases. “The success rate has been very low, with attrition rates of 95% for compounds in research, so a lot of money has been wasted on compounds that don't reach the market,” Bischoff noted.
That low success rate is partly why companies like Novartis AG, Pfizer Inc. and AstraZeneca PLC have dropped CNS research programs in recent years (Also see "AstraZeneca Goes Virtual In Neuroscience R&D As Part Of Workforce Reduction" - Pink Sheet, 2 Feb, 2012.).
Bischoff has deep knowledge of CNS research at big pharma. He trained as a neuropharmacologist and worked at Ciba-Geigy and later Novartis on various drug discovery programs in the CNS area for more than 25 years, before leaving in 2003 to become an entrepreneur.
Over the past five years, Rhenovia has worked with the team of computational neuroscientists at USC, including company co-founder Michel Baudry, to improve computer models to simulate normal neurobiology and pathological CNS conditions.
These biosimulations are then being used to predict how a potential drug, or combination of drugs, would affect the CNS.
“We have already discovered a new mechanism of action for an old drug, now called Rhedar, which has potential in Huntington’s disease,” Bischoff said. A number of different pairs of compounds have also been modeled, with one particular pair predicted to have an unexpected high efficacy in Alzheimer’s disease.
A Combination Transdermal Patch
Studying different combinations led Rhenovia to think about how they would be administered, and the company has come up with an “intelligent” transdermal patch, RHEpatch, which can contain up to seven different drugs, with the release of each one controlled independently via a built-in electronic system.
“We were lucky. We won a three-year Eurostars program which supplied funding and collaborators to develop the patch,” Bischoff explained.
The EU and 40 European countries in the EUREKA research network funded the Eurostars program. Rhenovia's collaborators included Swiss device company Portmann Instruments AG. But the device isn't core to Rhenovia's business and is expected to be spun out into a new company and developed further via partnerships with other companies.
Bischoff believes that Rhenovia's biosimulations may also be applicable to research in other industries, such as agrochemical companies worried about the effects of their pesticides and insecticides on the CNS, or military establishments searching for antidotes to nerve toxins, all of which could first be modeled using Rhenovia's biosimulations, thereby reducing the cost of research.