Arecor is a company working on the next generation in diabetes care. CEO Sarah Howell sat down with EPM to talk about the future of the disease.
Diabetes
What’s your priority as a company?
Our priority is to leverage our technology platform to develop superior treatments for diabetes care that will have a significant impact on improving the health outcomes and quality of life of people living with diabetes.
Over the past nine years at Arecor, we have attracted the very best scientific talent in to Arecor to develop an innovative and proprietary formulation technology platform that can be utilised to deliver superior biopharmaceuticals. We are now a leader in this field and we are leveraging this technology platform to enable improved treatments for diabetes care via the innovative reformulation of approved proteins and peptides.
How do you see medicine evolving?
This is a very broad question and I will focus on the advanced delivery of medicines rather than other very exciting areas such as immunotherapies where significant advances have clearly been made over the last 10 years and I would expect this to continue. Moving forward, I believe we will see significant advancements from collaborations across industries that will bring technology and life sciences together to not only further understand the underlying causes, and hence, develop effective treatments for diseases but will also focus on how to effectively and conveniently deliver these medicines to patients thus improving compliance, reducing healthcare burden and ultimately improving overall health outcomes. We see this as a key area within the treatment of diabetes for example.
Our mission is to bring together technology and life sciences to uncover new truths about health and disease.
How can you improve the patient experience?
Arecor’s mission is to leverage our innovative formulation technology platform to reformulate existing products to enhance the effectiveness and delivery of these medicines to patients. If we take insulin as an example, prandial insulin is used to control the blood glucose rise after meals for people living with diabetes. It is essential that insulin begins to act rapidly as possible i.e. to mimic glucose control that is achieved physiologically in a healthy individual. In addition, it is known that the continuous delivery of insulin via wearable devices such as patch pumps results in superior blood sugar control (glycemic control), and hence, improved health outcomes. However, currently available insulin pumps are intrusive, heavy and cumbersome which acts as a significant barrier to their use. Therefore, the delivery of a highly concentrated rapid acting insulin would enable the administration of a fast acting insulin in a miniaturised insulin pump which is a critical unmet need to break down the barrier to use and significantly improve the quality of life and health outcomes in these individuals.
What are the challenges to your work?
All of Arecor’s proprietary programmes rely on solving complex formulation challenges to deliver products that would otherwise not be possible using conventional formulation science. For example, for the ultra-concentrated insulin programme there are a number of complex formulation challenges that have to date prevented the development of this product, however, with our innovative approach to formulation we are confident in being able to deliver this product to patients. The two main challenges in increasing the concentration of insulin are (i) it slows down its onset of action in the body upon administration. As discussed earlier it is absolutely key that the insulin starts to work as quickly as possible upon injection to control blood glucose levels and (ii) it becomes more unstable, and hence, will not work as effectively. Both of these challenges can be overcome utilising Arecor’s formulation approaches
Name one goal to achieve today to move your work onwards
Today, our team of very talented scientists are working towards developing lead formulations that we are testing to confirm that they have sufficient stability and time-action profile upon administration (in-vivo) to be able to enable the miniaturisation of next generation insulin delivery devices. Demonstrating this in patients will be a key goal and take us a significant step closer to delivering this vastly improved insulin product to people living with diabetes.