EPM looks at the star performers we think stand out in the pharmaceutical sector
Nigel Theobald from N4 Pharma, Cecilia Mendy from Owen Mumford and Alastair Smith from Avacta Life Sciences
Drug delivery is always a hot topic in the pharmaceutical sector. Cecilia Mendy, Owen Mumford, revealed the current and future initiatives at this drug delivery device business.
The company was recently awarded the Red Dot award for Product Design for its new diabetes pen needle with built-in remover, Unifine Pentips Plus.
Unifine Pentips Plus is said to be the world’s first pen needle with built-in remover, developed for end-users with diabetes who are self-injecting insulin or glucagon-like peptide-1 analogues. Unifine Pentips Plus is designed to encourage adherence to a good injection routine and is proven to increase the rate of pen needle change among end-users.
According to Mendy, a study observing the impact of Unifine Pentips Plus on pen needle changing behaviour amongst people with diabetes, showed that when using Unifine Pentips Plus, the rate of pen needle change increased by 61% compared with their current pen needle.
Mendy believes this product has the potential to bring about change. In addition to end-users needs and adherence issues, the company says it understands the complexities of creating medical devices for partners with complex requirements and international markets.
What’s the alternative?
There was a lot of interest when Alastair Smith, Avacta Life Sciences, outlined his company’s work developing engineered alternatives to antibodies. He explained how the company is focussing on creating tools to support research into ubiquitin and the ubiquitin proteasome system. The covalent addition of ubiquitin to a target protein is now known to modulate most key processes in a cell. This is a relatively new area of biology and the tools, specifically antibodies, are not yet available to allow researchers to do the fundamental biology research that is required. There are several classes of proteins involved in this system: Ligases that add the ubiquitin to a target protein, DUBs which remove ubiquitin chains and then the ubiquitin chains themselves.
Avacta provides Affimer binders that recognise specific di-ubiquitin chains and offers Affimers that it says are unique as no equivalent antibody exists. Customer feedback has been strong with K33 and K6 ubiquitin binders, for example, having proved very popular.
Smith is excited about the potential applications of Affimers as therapeutics. Having already signed an exciting licensing partnership with Moderna Therapeutics to provide exclusive access to Affimers against certain targets, the potential of Affimers is now being recognised by the industry, he says.
One example of where Affimers are being used in an exciting application is around the modulation of blood clotting. Cardiovascular disease (CVD) remains the main cause of morbidity and mortality in the developed world. Fibrin clot structure and fibrinolysis can determine predisposition to CVD and manipulating the prothrombotic environment can reduce the risk of vascular events.
One 4 pharma
Meanwhile other exciting developments came from N4 Pharma. Nigel Theobald explained how the company’s initial focus has been on developing Cocrys which can be used to improve a drug’s solubility either to improve onset of action or increase bioavailability and can also be used to control the solubility to enable a sustained release effect. Crucially the process uses standard twin screw extruders and is therefore capable of large volume efficient commercial production of the co-crystals.
N4 Pharma has also developed Nuvac a nano-carrier delivery system for antigens that improves both humoral and cell mediation effects for vaccines. It can be used to reduce vaccine dose or improve vaccine or antibody drug conjugate performance and our first program with Nuvac is a single dose version of the hepatitis B vaccine using the antigen HBsAg.
Supply and demand
Further innovation came from AMCo. CEO John Beighton, CEO explained how the company supplies medicines that the big pharma companies no longer want to supply. AMCo continues to produce them for groups of patients who are unable to get them anywhere else. These medicines, says Beighton, are often hard to make from a technical point of view and are often only required by small groups of patients. By ensuring they continue to be produced the company provides a vital service for those who need them most.
The ongoing thread of AMCo’s strategy is to acquire and develop niche medicines which are vital to patients who would be unable to get them elsewhere.
The company is working on streamlining and reversioning these medicines so they absolutely suit patients’ needs. This involves changing formulations or even strengths of medicines that were often developed decades ago to make them much more suited to the modern patient. This often leads to reducing the pill-burden on patients and therefore to greater compliance and improved efficacy.