In January 2013, Zacharon Pharmaceuticals Inc was acquired by a former - but now much larger - SBIR awardee BioMarin. .Zacharon Pharmaceuticals, Inc. had been a biotechnology company working on discovery of first-in-class small molecule drugs that target glycans. Glycans, the carbohydrate chains of glycoproteins, proteoglycans, and glycolipids, represent a relatively unexploited area for drug development. Past attempts at developing drugs that target glycans have been limited by slow and expensive carbohydrate chemistry as well as the lack of effective glycan-targeted high-throughput screening methods. Zacharon created novel high-throughput screening methods to overcome these limitations and identify glycan-targeted small molecule drugs with strong efficacy and safety profiles. With the technology and glycobiology expertise, Zacharon could potentially be a key player in the field of glycan-targeted drug discovery with the potential to enhance drug development and guide clinical decision-making for diseases in which glycans are implicated in disease pathogenesis
