Company Profile

Sequoia Sciences is a pharmaceutical company discovering and developing new medicines for the treatment of bacterial infections and cancers. The firm’s development programs consist of small molecules targeting bacterial infections and cancers, and also vaccines for the treatment and prevention of recurrent urinary tract infections. In collaboration with arange of players - corporations, research and academci institutions, - the firm’s goal is to improve the quality of life for those individuals significantly affected by recurrent and chronic bacterial infections and cancers. Sequoia's Anticancer Program identified a novel chemical scaffold from a plant with the potential to replace first-line therapies for certain solid tumors. The firm’s lead compound enables more frequent dosing than first-line therapies due to an improved safety profile. Medicines used by oncologists to treat the majority of solid tumors and various other cancers have not significantly changed in the last twenty years. In fact, the taxanes, platinums, nitrogen mustards, nucleoside analogues, anthracyclines, and camptothecins are all still first-line or primary therapies despite record increases in R&D spending by the National Institutes of Health and the pharmaceutical industry. The firm’s internal antibacterial program has discovered a variety of novel compounds that show inhibition of bacterial biofilms that are synthetically accessible. The firms research indicates that these compounds appear to prevent the formation or maintenance of a protective coating produced by bacteria that increase the bacteria’s resistance to immune responses and antibiotics and enable their attachment to surfaces including human cells, medical devices, and teeth. The firm’s lead compounds have demonstrated broad-spectrum biofilm inhibition against Streptococci spp., Staphylococcus epidermidis, Escherichia coli and Pseudomonas aeruginosa. These compounds have demonstrated synergistic effects with antibiotics in bioreactors mimicking the resistant biofilms observed in chronic infections. The compounds specifically target biofilms, bacteria embedded in a structural matrix. The discovery of biofilms is rather recent, but now, the presence of biofilms is recognized as ubiquitous:  mildew festering in bathroom grout, plaque film accumulating on teeth and river