| From: donpat | 3/23/2006 12:08:26 PM | | | | | | DRUG DISCOVERY
Nanotechnology Drug-Delivery Companies Seeking to Partner with Pharmaceutical Companies Face Competition from a Plethora of Available Drug-Delivery Systems
DUBLIN, Ireland--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 23, 2006 - Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/c32297) has announced the addition of Nanotechnology for Drug Discovery and Drug Design to their offering.
Nanotechnology, a field of science and technology that aims to control matter at the atomic, molecular, and macromolecular level, potentially has far-reaching and paradigm-shifting implications for biology, drug discovery, and medical technologies. The discipline has already yielded discoveries that have been used for drug delivery and diagnostic purposes, and nanotech applications coming to market will include more of the same, in addition to uses in preclinical assays and other assay technologies. Nanotechnology, however, has uses in many fields besides biomedical science. Governments have recognized the broad reach of nanotechnology, and they have poured large sums of money into nanotech R&D to ensure their future competitiveness. This investment has already yielded many discoveries in the field, and it is broadening opportunities for nanotechnology in drug discovery and research.
In this report, Decision Resources describe various nanotechnologies under development for biological and medical purposes and assess their potential. We also highlight the activities of companies applying nanotechnology to the biological and medical sciences.
Business Implications
-- Nanotechnology is an emerging science that could have far-reaching and paradigm-shifting implications for biology, drug discovery, and medical technologies. Nanotechnologies for biological applications already in use include liposomal drug-delivery agents, transfection agents, and magnetic resonance imaging contrast agents. An important advantage of nanotechnology will be its ability to enable and improve upon other technologies, including RNA interference, gene delivery, and proteomics.
-- Multifunctional nanoparticles that combine targeting, delivery, and imaging components will have important clinical potential but a complex regulatory path. We anticipate that the first and most extensive use of multifunctional nanoparticles will be applications in the area of drug target and lead validation studies. These multifunctional particles and complex combination technologies will carry very complex intellectual property issues that will likely lead to the need for multiparty licensing.
-- Many governments have recognized the importance of harnessing nanotechnology to achieve industrial competitiveness and have invested heavily in funding nanotechnology research and innovation. In the absence of private and venture investment, various government initiatives have fostered the growth of numerous nanotechnology companies. These companies have a variety of business models, and many are focused on research tool development, in vivo imaging, and drug delivery.
-- Nanotechnology drug-delivery companies seeking to partner with pharmaceutical companies face competition from a plethora of available drug-delivery systems. Nevertheless, pharmaceutical companies may choose to develop their own systems using skills gleaned from corporate partnerships; this approach may be an advantage to nanotechnology companies. The report anticipates that pharmaceutical companies will continue to partner with a variety of nanotechnology companies to find the best technologies for drug-delivery and discovery needs. -0-
Contents Include:
- Introduction
- Nanotechnology and Nanoparticles
- Nanotechnology in Biology and Biomedicine
- Nanotechnologies and Applications
- Government Initiatives
- Hurdles and Challenges to Implementation
- Business Models and Strategies
- Company Profiles
- Outlook for Nanotechnology in Drug Discovery and Design
Companies Mentioned:- -0-
Advanced Magnetics
Alnis BioSciences
Alza
(subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson)
BioDelivery Sciences International
C Sixty
Calando Pharmaceuticals
Dendritic NanoTechnologies
Hermes Biosciences
ImaRx Therapeutics
iMEDD
Intradigm
Kereos
MagForce Nanotechnologies
MolecularDiamond Technologies
NanoCarrier
Nanoprobes
Nanospectra Biosciences
Nanosphere
NanoString Technologies
Protiva Biotherapeutics
Qiagen
Quantum Dot
Starpharma
Triton BioSystems
For more information visit researchandmarkets.com
pharmalive.com |
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| From: donpat | 3/23/2006 1:34:46 PM | | | | | | Nano-dose to be zapped into cancerous cells
By Lautaro Vargas, 23 March 2006
The University of East Anglia has received the backing of the world’s leading cancer research charity to develop a unique nanotechnology-based treatment that can deliver anti-cancer drugs direct to cancerous cells.
The University of East Anglia has received the backing of the world’s leading cancer research charity to develop a unique nanotechnology-based treatment that can deliver anti-cancer drugs direct to cancerous cells.
Cancer Research UK’s £150,000 grant will enable the University of East Anglia (UEA) to take the nano-treatment, which combines photodynamic therapy (PDT) with optimised cancer therapies, out of the test tube and into toxicity tests.
Appropriate medication is attached to tiny particles of gold, which is then steered through the body.
While PDT is already offered on the NHS, the drugs used are not what project leader, Professor David Russell refers to as optimised.
Though the patented technology is yet to enter pre-clinical trials, it has already been the subject of a licensing deal with an unnamed UK-based pre-competitive drug development company.
Prof Russell’s UEA team has been working on proof of principle studies in collaboration with a group from Italy for the last 12 months, originally supported by a £60,000 grant from the Iceni Seedcorn Fund.
The group successfully demonstrated the technology’s work with different targets, which highlighted its commercial potential and persuaded Cancer Research to provide funding to take the work onto the next level.
That money comes in next month and will support work over two years.
“The idea is to deliver a light-activated drug to cancer tumours,” said Prof Russell.
“We have done this in cells in a dish and are now moving onto in vivo work with the funding from Cancer Research UK.
“Our technique can be adapted for use with existing drugs. We have also developed novel drugs with optimised properties.
“These are undergoing pre-clinical toxicity tests at the moment.”
Because of the prohibitive cost of taking drug targets through to market, Prof Russell expects the group’s work will not go beyond selling the licenses to the technology and novel drugs developed.
However, Prof Russell does expect to spin a company out within the next couple of years to commercialise a nano-sensor product which can instantly detect dangerous biological substances for use in anti-terrorist operations.
He said: “The University is very keen to see a spin-out and we have a very small investment from Iceni again.
“We need to get to the stage where we have a marketable product, which should be about three years from now.”
Supported by a three year £219,000 grant from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), the project also has the support of the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory of the Ministry of Defence, who provide access to the deadly substances the technique tests.
Work is also progressing well on adapting the sensor for use in developing countries to detect water infected with cholera and other diseases as a result of natural disasters and the low-level detection necessary for cholera testing has been achieved.
In both instances the on-the-spot detection system harnesses the ability of coated metal particles to change colour in the presence of toxins, viruses and bacteria, providing a quick ‘yes/no’ indication of the safety of substances found at crime scenes, in luggage or in suspects’ possession.
The technique coats the metal nanoparticles with different sugars that recognise particular biological substances.
The substance binds to the sugar, which causes a solution containing the nanoparticles to change colour. Again gold is the favourite agent.
businessweekly.co.uk |
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| From: donpat | 3/23/2006 6:46:04 PM | | | | | | General Strategies for Nanoparticle Dispersion
Science 24 March 2006:
Vol. 311. no. 5768, pp. 1740 - 1743
DOI: 10.1126/science.1122225
Reports
General Strategies for Nanoparticle Dispersion
Michael E. Mackay,1,2* Anish Tuteja,1 Phillip M. Duxbury,2 Craig J. Hawker,3,4 Brooke Van Horn,4 Zhibin Guan,5 Guanghui Chen,5 R. S. Krishnan1
Traditionally the dispersion of particles in polymeric materials has proven difficult and frequently results in phase separation and agglomeration. We show that thermodynamically stable dispersion of nanoparticles into a polymeric liquid is enhanced for systems where the radius of gyration of the linear polymer is greater than the radius of the nanoparticle. Dispersed nanoparticles swell the linear polymer chains, resulting in a polymer radius of gyration that grows with the nanoparticle volume fraction. It is proposed that this entropically unfavorable process is offset by an enthalpy gain due to an increase in molecular contacts at dispersed nanoparticle surfaces as compared with the surfaces of phase-separated nanoparticles. Even when the dispersed state is thermodynamically stable, it may be inaccessible unless the correct processing strategy is adopted, which is particularly important for the case of fullerene dispersion into linear polymers.
1 Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA.
2 Department of Physics and Astronomy, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA.
3 Materials Research Laboratory, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA.
4 IBM Almaden Research Center, 650 Harry Road, San Jose, CA 95120, USA.
5 Department of Chemistry, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697, USA.
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: mackay@msu.edu
sciencemag.org |
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| To: Becky who wrote (1175) | 3/24/2006 2:53:58 PM | | From: moby_dick | | | | | yup - I actually was lucky enough to sell into it - at $3.55 and then $3.46...began buying back a little early though at $2.94 and again at $2.65.....always keeping 50% of my shares as non-trading status. :-) Long-term, this baby will be much, much higher I believe.... |
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| From: donpat | 3/25/2006 7:18:31 AM | | | | | | Bristol-Myers Squibb
From:
tinyurl.com
*******************************************************
CLASS OF 1980
Title : I am looking for startup capital for a spinoff drug delivery technology company
From : Anil Diwan
Message : Hi guys,
Here is a business oriented recap of TheraCour, a drug delivery technology I have been working on for the past 10 years. This is the first time I am looking for Angel Investor and VC funds. So far, I have driven the ventures solely on direct sales and income from business! Please help. You can email me at adiwan@iitbombay(.)org.
TheraCour Pharma will be a spinoff from AllExcel, Inc., West Haven, CT (near New Haven, Yale U) where the Specialty Drug Delivery Vehicles, trademarked TheraCour have been developed over the last 10 years, and are now ready for commercialization.
TheraCour is an advanced drug delivery technology that helps solve all three major challenges of drug delivery: Solubility, Permeability, and Targeting
TheraCour Pharma has a 3-Tier Revenue Model, with revenue generation starting as early as 2nd year, and net positive cash flow as early as 5th year. [Research Market Sales, Licensing Fees, and Commercial Royalties are the three tiers]. Research Market Sales do not have FDA registration needs.
Investment Needs:
Currently, we need about $2MM in the first year to solidify IP position and solidify some of the nascent PharmaCo partnerships.
A total investment outlay of $25MM will be needed to reach the planned controlled growth with a highly conservative estimated net income of about $25MM p.a. in Year 6, which will double in Year 7, and grow at 20-30% p.a. for another 3 years to a stable plateau. There is opportunity to use the income to develop our own drugs and take the company to multibillion dollar valuation.
An ambitious growth plan that reaches net positive cash flow in 4th year and at higher revenues is possible with a investment of about $40MM.
Clear Milestones that are achievable and can be traced for investment inflows have been developed.
Product Positioning:
The specialty drug delivery marketplace addressed by TheraCour is worth about $10 billion (injectable excipients, liposome technologies, and airway delivery). There are only a handful of players (only 5 significant players) in there, and we have technological edge over all existing players, as well as potential in-comers. The most successful business, Alza, based on liposome technologies, had sales of leading drug Doxil at about $1billion, and was purchased by J&J for $10billion. This is the potential we can reach and probably even go beyond, in ten years.
Barriers for Competition: Our entry into the market will be a great barrier for new companies to surpass since
1. we solve all three major drug delivery challenges, and since
2. commercial usages requires developing expensive FDA registered ToxPackage data and Drug Master Files.
3. We have significant cost and performance advantages over liposome technologies.
IP Proprietary, Patentable, Leading Edge Technologies
The new TheraCour technologies to be commercialized are currently fully proprietary and have international patentability. We have one patent issued on our older technologies, indicative of our leadership position.
Market Need is Addressed
We already have interest from several Pharmaceutical Companies in TheraCour technologies. We are in the process of reaching a Material transfer Agreement with Bristol-Myers-Squibb shortly, for BMS to evaluate TheraCour drug delivery vehicles in a solubility pre-pilot. Our corresponding internal pre-pilot is successful.
Choice of a drug delivery vehicle by a PharmaCo is based purely on performance and cost metrics. We have an edge in both of these (technical details need to be discussed here).
We have a strong Management Team, consisting of Board Members Mr. Harry H. Penner , Jr. (seasoned PharmaCo executive and dignitary, Legal Counsel), Dr. Vivek S. Kavadi (Oncologist, Chair, Cancer Srevices Center of US Oncology; Harvard MD, Rice BA), Mr. Rana Tewari (International Finance Expert), and CEO Anil R. Diwan ( inventor of TheraCour and several other technologies, successfully managed two businesses and navigated through tough times with an eye on thrift, cost consciousness, high productivity metrics and balanced books; Rice Ph.D., IITBombay B.Tech.), COO/Business Development Mr. Joe Kaufman (formerly VP, Informatics at Agilix, Inc., inventor of two Agilix patents), CTO Jayant Tatake (experienced in GMP Production of Pharmaceutical Intermediates, Synthesis and Process Scaleup, UDCT Bombay PhD). All of our exceutives and management team members have 15 to 26 years of experience in the specialty pharmaceuticals related businesses.
We are now preparing scaled presentations for different audiences and with extensive visual impact. We are also refining the story-telling.
Nitin D, Ram K: This is the great thing I had said I was working on in the few years ago's note.
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| From: donpat | 3/26/2006 8:24:41 AM | | | | | | Pig virus hits Ontario herds
Sun, March 26, 2006
By CP
STRATFORD, Ont. -- A virulent new strain of a common pig virus is wreaking havoc on Ontario hog herds.
Tens of thousands of hogs have been removed from farms by deadstock companies this winter and last year.
They are victims of new strain of porcine circovirus or other illnesses that the autoimmune disease brings on or makes worse.
"It's just terrible the number of animals that are dying from disease this year," said Winnie Linton, who has lost about half of the 2,000 hogs on the farm she and husband Dave run near Mitchell.
"We see the light at the end of the tunnel because our barn is almost empty," she added, managing a weak laugh.
Larry Skinner, chair of Ontario Pork's board, said provincewide mortality rates are running at 10% to 12%, or some five to six times above the norm on affected farms.
On the hardest-hit farms, the figure is 40% to 50% or more and he sympathized with those struggling farmers.
Meat packers are also starting to worry about a pork shortage, he said.
But for hog farmers, it's a double or even triple-whammy.
They're running up costs trying to treat the sick animals, losing revenue when the hogs die and don't make it to market, and feeling the emotional stress of seeing their animals suffer.
And all at the same time as they face market prices of 20 to 30 cents below the break-even mark of roughly $1.50 per kilogram.
edmontonsun.com |
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| From: donpat | 3/26/2006 8:35:57 AM | | | | | | Experts hope 1918 virus sheds light on pandemics
By Sandy Kleffman
Knight Ridder Newspapers
Sunday, March 26, 2006
WALNUT CREEK, Calif. — Terrence Tumpey stepped into the laboratory and glanced at the dead mice. Suddenly it hit him — the significance of what scientists were attempting.
A few days earlier, Tumpey had infected the mice with genes from the 1918 influenza virus. The virus killed 40 million to 50 million people in the worst infectious disease outbreak in recorded history, then vanished.
[CONT.]
deseretnews.com |
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| From: donpat | 3/26/2006 8:45:34 AM | | | | | | When a Disease Loses Its Most Potent Ally, Fear
Jean-Christophe Kahn/Reuters
STORM BEFORE THE CALM A quarantined medical worker wears a protective mask against SARS in Beijing in 2004, and mad cow testing in western France in 2000. Both diseases are now seen as less of a threat.
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
Published: March 26, 2006
THE obituary for mad cow disease was written earlier this month. Maybe you didn't notice.
The disease isn't really dead. But its power to terrify seems to be.
On March 13, the government said that a cow in Alabama was the third in the country to have the disease. The New York Times ran its article on Page 25, and other papers did roughly the same.
There was no clamor of "press cover-up!" But neither had the disease, formally called spongiform encephalopathy, which turns the brain into a grainy lump of Swiss cheese, become any less horrific since the first mad cow in the United States, discovered in December 2003, led to nervous "Is Beef Safe?" headlines across the country.
Instead, it had finally become clear that any threat to people is very, very remote.
Over the last two years, bending to pressure from consumer groups and its own inspector general, the Agriculture Department had finally tested 650,000 animals instead of a token handful. It had also adopted rapid tests and banned "downer" cattle from the food supply so that the most disgusting aspect of the first case would not be repeated: that the old dairy cow that tested positive had been in a truckload of animals so broken by age, disease and injury that some had to be winched out to the slaughter, and that all had been ground into hamburger and sold before the test results were in.
Mad cow isn't the only disease in recent years to soar into high-flying panic and then collapse into the "I wonder whatever happened to ... ?" category.
One could argue that the obituary for resurgent smallpox was written on June 18, 2003, and that SARS died on Feb. 19, 2005.
The first date is the one on which the Centers for Disease Control admitted that the smallpox vaccination drive ordered by the Bush administration in the lead-up to invading Iraq had ground to a halt. The administration had wanted 500,000 health workers to be vaccinated because Saddam Hussein or others might unleash weaponized smallpox. But barely 38,000 volunteered.
The latter date is the one on which a microbiologist from the University of Colorado, after a review of worldwide scientific literature, announced that the virus that causes SARS, a respiratory illness that had killed about 10 percent of 8,000 victims two years earlier, was no longer found in humans. (Later, scientists found that it thrives in bats, ending hope of total eradication.)
Why, in each of these cases, was a public frenzy whipped up, only to fade again? And what does that say about today's mounting frenzy over avian flu? In the past, "we cried wolf too fast, revving up the emotions and there was nothing to show for it," said Judith Walzer Leavitt, professor of medical history at the University of Wisconsin.
An obvious scapegoat is the media, which is often accused of being alarmist about medical news. But a more important factor was simpler: fear waxed or waned according to whether the public thought government was being honest.
In the case of mad cow disease, there were early accusations that the government was playing down the threat to protect the beef industry. The secretary of agriculture when the first case was found, Ann M. Veneman, was a former food industry lobbyist, her critics noted, and her chief spokeswoman's last job had been press representative for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association.
In the case of smallpox, there was suspicion that the government was exaggerating the threat to whip up support for its drive to war. As skeptics then pointed out, smallpox had been eradicated worldwide in 1977, and if Mr. Hussein had a cache, he presumably would have vaccinated his troops against it, which he had not.
In the case of SARS, it was not the American government, but the Chinese one, whose motives were questioned. It was concealing cases and refusing entry to international disease detectives.
"If you want the public's cooperation, honesty and frankness is much better," Professor Leavitt said.
In 1894, she noted, smallpox sparked a month of rioting in Milwaukee. The cause wasn't the disease itself, but the city's policy of seizing sick children in immigrant Polish and German neighborhoods and taking them to isolation hospitals, while leaving wealthy families alone, saying their larger houses and abundant servants would isolate them. With rioters flinging hot water and pepper in the eyes of the police and their horses, a vaccination drive collapsed and the epidemic spread.
Now the public is nervous about another potential pandemic.
Virologists disagree about whether the A(H5N1) virus that is killing chickens by the millions has the genetic power to do the same to humans, as the flus of 1918, 1957 and 1968 did. It could be a plague of medieval proportions — or it could fade as the swine flu threat of 1976 did.
Right now, the situation is reminiscent of SARS. Like that disease, avian flu originated in China, and some crucial questions have never been answered — like how much Chinese poultry vaccines were to blame for the disease festering in birds for nine years, and whether the virus infected thousands of Chinese who never got sick.
But no one is speculating about an American government cover-up. Its most respected health officials, like Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Julie Gerberding, have admitted that the country is utterly vulnerable.
Nor is any powerful industry, like drugmakers or poultry raisers, accused of having a thumb on the scale of public policy, as the beef industry was during mad cow.
Predicting what a virus will do is impossible. But humans are predictable. John M. Barry, author of "The Great Influenza," a history of the 1918 pandemic argued that even if A(H5N1) becomes a killer, the panic it creates will fade faster than might be expected now, when a sense of mystery still enshrouds a threat that normally would sound silly — a "killer bird flu."
"What people are afraid of is the unknown," he said. "Not eating meat because you're worried about mad cow is like not going in the water because you saw 'Jaws.' But once the threat arrives, even if there's an undercurrent of terror in the whole society, people see the consequences and they get accustomed to it, just as they got accustomed to plague in the Middle Ages."
nytimes.com |
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