Date: Feb 15, 2012 Source: LARTA (
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InvivoSciences and Myomics, both Larta NIH-CAP alumni, have partnered to provide innovative technologies that will enable pharma to develop new classes of drugs targeting rare diseases as well as common disorders. When we heard about the partnership, we engaged in conversation with InvivoSciences CEO Ayla Annac and Myomics CEO Dr. Herman Vandenburgh via Q&A to discuss the companies' goals, vision and challenges.
2 Larta Alumni Partner: InvivoSciences & Myomics
InvivoSciences and Myomics, both Larta NIH-CAP alumni, partnered to provide innovative technologies that will enable pharma to develop new classes of drugs targeting rare diseases as well as unmet common disorders. After recent word of the corporate partnership, Larta engaged InvivoSciences CEO Ayla Annac and Myomics CEO Dr. Herman Vandenburgh in a Q&A to discuss the companies' goals, vision and challenges.
Q: InvivoSciences and Myomics both aim to improve human health by enabling discovery and development of new therapeutics. What is driving the need for improvement over existing therapeutics?
A: During the past years the cost of developing effective pharmaceuticals has greatly increased and their rate of approval has decreased. Too few new drugs are entering the marketplace. One major factor contributing to these trends is the difficulty of identifying promising materials and assuring both their efficacy and safety at an early stage of the drug discovery process. Efficacy of drug candidates in human applications is not well-predicted during the preclinical stage.
Myomics' and InvivoSciences' (IVS) initial clinical focus areas are the diseases and drug-induced side effects that affect skeletal and cardiac muscle, respectively. There is a great need for new and innovative drugs to combat the skeletal muscle weakness and fatigue suffered by 24 million patients. The American Heart Association estimates ardiovascular related health care cost will triple by 2022 to $818 billion, as the United States population ages. In addition, cardiotoxicity is one of the primarily causes for drug withdrawal from the marketplace. The combined goals of IVS and Myomics as a result of their partnership are to contribute to the improvement of human health by establishing a new paradigm for discovering new drugs for these and other indications taking proper account of safety issues more rapidly and cost effectively than is possible today.
Q: You have partnered to improve processes for drug discovery. How does your joint approach tackle this issue?
A: NIH-funded projects allowed both companies to independently develop novel drug discovery platforms that are fundamentally different than previous technologies. Recently, methods have been developed to gain important information about the biological effects of test compounds by observing their activity at the cellular level in tissue culture. IVS and Myomics have extended this approach, developing in vitro methods to test the effects of compounds at the tissue functional level. The advantage of this approach (shown in the figure below as current ver. 1) is a better predictor of a compound's efficacy in follow-up animal studies. In addition, tissues for testing can be engineered from a patient's cells, giving clinicians greater confidence that a compound will work in a particular individual patient.
Compound screening based on tissue physiology reduces time and cost of the drug discovery process by prioritizing preclinical animal studies and by reducing drug attrition rates. Our platforms employ engineered tissues that recapitulate normal and diseased human tissues to analyze compound--induced changes in their functional properties. IVS' Palpator™ technology uses a force transducer-based approach ideally suited for mechanical measurements such as tissue stress-strain, elasticity, and fatigue. Myomics' MyoForce Analysis System (MFAS™) technology is an image-based technology that allows the measurement of tissue contractile properties. The two systems nicely complement each other and offer potential clients a wider range of tissue-based assays. Both companies have developed systems that include tissue based consumables and instruments to perform in-house analyses.
Q: How has your joint partnership enhanced or accelerated the achievement of these goals?
A: We can reduce duplication and cost while increasing our productivity and ability to bring creative solutions to customers and to provide combinations of technologies that we have developed. Thus, we can respond to needs quickly by creating cost effective solutions or products to a clients' individual requirements. Furthermore, we can deliver unique results unattainable by other methods while we stand by the quality of our brands with our customer service.
Q: Are you seeing promising results in the lab?
A: In less than 3 years, positive compound hits using our Tissue Based-High Content Analysis technology on human patient engineered tissues have led to one initiated clinical trial and another in the design phase. This rapid translation of positive compound hits to clinical trials was accomplished by targeting FDA-approved drugs for ‘repurposing' for other indications, by screening with human engineered tissues, and by providing results based on tissue function. The result is getting drugs into clinical trials rapidly at a fraction of the normal cost of preclinical studies.
Rapidly progressing technologies in stem cell biology have been applied successfully to improve cost-efficiency and reproducibility of mass-producing engineered tissues. Employment of a highly robust and cost-effective differentiation protocol of cardiomyocytes from human pluripotent stem cells is quickly transforming ‘engineered heart tissue' (EHT) into an indispensable component of drug discovery systems. The technology has potential to become an essential element in personalized medicine by discovering, diagnosing, and selecting the right treatment for individuals.
Q: What major hurdles are still left to overcome in order to achieve your goals?
A: As for all other companies in the industry, finding synergistic funding partners is a critical challenge. Therefore, while we keep working on our next level of technology development, we seek partners in development and distribution for our current line of products that include consumables, reagent kits and services. We are committed to continue working on improvement of the productivity, reliability, and diversity of the assay platforms. Increasing the rate of screening via further miniaturization and automation of our screening formats from the current 96 well plate format to 384 and 1536 well plate systems is critical to move our technologies to cost-effective high through-put primary compound bank screens (shown as ver. 2 in the figure above). We are also looking to unify our vendors and systems to create additional lines of affordable research tools and products (consumables, reagents, kits, assay development tools) for different clients, including academic centers, non-profit foundations, manufactures of cosmetics, consumer goods, functional nutrition, and animal health products and chemical industries.
Q: What else can we expect to see out of this partnership?
A: We are collaborating to improve our technology and marketing, and to reduce duplication of business and working capital expenses. Quite a few profitable options will emerge out of this partnership since our cutting edge platform technologies, products and services are highly compatible, synergistic and create unique competitive advantages when combined. Our companies can package their technologies under different strategic business units to match up with development, distribution and manufacturing partners who operate in either the drug discovery or drug development space for multiple therapeutics. Our technologies serve customers in multiple industries for either screening or product and application development goals. It is an exciting time for us to choose the best partner in each industry as well as determine partners in distribution of our consumables around the world.
Q: Both companies have participated in Larta's NIH-Commercialization Assistance Program. What did you get out of your work with Larta?
A: Larta helped us to focus on our strengths based on our technology platforms and reposition our commercial strategy per target industry to protect our assets and define the purpose of our partnership and funding goals. Larta also opened a new and exciting world to us by connecting us with a pool of experts that understand our business stage and its needs. This will lead us to partners that can help achieve our business and funding goals together and to successfully commercialize our technologies toward target industries worldwide. Reaching our goals requires contributions of the best minds and teams as well as finding synergistic partners in a timely manner so we use our resources creatively and focus our effort on-target at all times. We are very happy and excited to be part of Larta and its network and hope to be beneficial to its future members with what we have to offer at this stage.
