From Bloomberg today
Nov. 13 (Bloomberg) -- Vincent Mutel saw so much potential in a new way of tweaking the brain's circuitry that he left a job he'd had for 15 years to bet his future on a start-up.
The ability to move fast and take a risk on a hunch in his six-year-old venture, Geneva-based Addex Pharmaceuticals Ltd., is paying off. The company has signed licensing deals with Johnson & Johnson and Merck & Co. to make schizophrenia and Parkinson's disease medicines, and Addex's first pill, a treatment for migraine and heartburn, may be introduced in 2012.
The Addex approach represents a promising way for creating medicines at a time when the pharmaceutical industry is struggling to find new products. Its potential has attracted the attention of Pfizer Inc., Novartis AG and Roche Holding AG, Mutel's former employer, which say the drug-hunting method may lead to safer, more effective therapies.
``Addex has done with a fairly small company what in many cases larger companies have failed to do,'' said Darryle Schoepp, head of neuroscience research and development at Whitehouse Station, New Jersey-based Merck. ``They've done the best job of taking the technology and turning what is a compound into what might be a drug.''
Most modern medicines work by mimicking or blocking the action of molecules in the body that help carry out chemical reactions linked to a disease. Addex's treatments differ in that they are designed to regulate or fine-tune the molecules' activity. Researchers say this softer approach may cause fewer side effects than conventional drugs.
Valium
The concept, known as allosteric modulation, isn't new. Roche introduced the tranquilizer Valium in 1963, and although scientists didn't fully realize it at the time, the pill works in a similar way to Addex's drugs. It wasn't until three decades later, when a new way of screening compounds became common, that researchers saw that many such therapies may be possible.
The first medicine to use the approach to act on a family of proteins targeted by about half of all new drugs was Amgen Inc.'s Sensipar for kidney-disease complications. The treatment won U.S. approval in 2004 and had sales of $161 million during this year's third quarter, a 32 percent gain over the same period in 2007.
``Sensipar does appear to be the validation of the concept because it's safe, has fewer side effects and represents a significant advance on whatever else is available,'' said Arthur Christopoulos, professor of pharmacology at Monash University in Australia. He has worked as a scientific adviser on the approach to Addex, as well as Pfizer, Amgen and GlaxoSmithKline Plc. <snip> |
