Mercury Therapeutics hunts big game in Madrid
Mercury Therapeutics is hunting for big game at BIO-Europe Spring 2008 in Madrid on April 7-9.
In their sights are Big Pharma, Big Biotech and companies with the infrastructure to develop and launch a product into the Type 2 Diabetes and Metabolic Symdrome (T2DM) space.
Marquant Partners is carrying the portfolio for Mercury Therapeutics Inc. (MTI) which contains what some observers have described as “an abundance of riches.”
With a proprietary screening platform identifying numerous therapeutically important chemotypes, Mercury has “more than a handful of opportunities,” Mercury’s chairman Stan Yakatan told Partnering News.
On Wednesday, April 9, MTI will present its projects and capabilities at BIO-Europe Spring during a session planned for 9 a.m.
MTI is talking openly about a blockbuster, a term most people used with extreme caution these days, even more so when it concerns diabetic therapeutics, the lead condition to be addressed in trials by MTI’s adenosine monophosphate activated protein kinase (AMPK).
President and Chief Executive at MTI, Dr. Neal C. Birnberg, said his company’s intellectual property (IP) and its future success is based on developing an orally delivered molecule that is a direct AMPK activator, triggering a metabolic reaction that inspires more popular descriptions such as “exercise in a bottle” or the “jogging pill.”
Both exercise and AMPK activation have similar metabolic effects.
“Direct AMPK activation in whole animals has historically been difficult to achieve” says Birnberg, “At MTI, we have designed multiple series of direct AMPK activators and inhibitors.”
AMPK plays a key role in maintaining cellular and whole body energy balance and is found in all cells and tissues, but most importantly in skeletal muscle, liver, and adipose tissue.
Type 2 diabetes (T2DM) is the first clinical indication for MTI’s direct AMPK activators. Clinical evidence supporting AMP-activated protein kinase as an effective drug target for type 2 diabetes is a result of the recently discovered mechanism of action of the best-selling anti-diabetic drug metformin, which turns out to be an indirect AMPK activator.
While MTI’s lead compounds trigger a beneficial set of metabolic responses, it will not be expected to have the off-target adverse effects associated with metformin use or the increased cardiovascular disease incidence of the thiazolidines” Birnberg added, citing the example of Avandia.
“Direct AMPK activation is an unexploited approach to diabetes therapy,” said Birnberg. “If you were to ask me why I believe we will succeed, and why this is a potential blockbuster, I would tell you we are developing an orally delivered medication that will add a significant delay, in years, to the time when a diabetic patient will need injected insulin.”
“By increasing sensitivity to insulin among patients who can still produce their own, AMPK activation will delay the progression of type 2 diabetes to dependence on injecting insulin 4-8 times per day in a way that avoids known long term health risks,” he said.
Chairman Yakatan said he retained Marquant Partners to secure a traditional bio-technology transaction.
“MTI is owned by an industrial group,” he said. “We are looking to partner early, rather than later, with someone who can assist with the clinical trial program and then take this all the way through to the market.”
Birnberg said he expects to submit an Investigational New Drug application to the FDA in 18 to 24 months, with an expected 4 to 5 years of clinical studies before an approval decision is made.
Birnberg said that an extensive body of research on AMP kinase shows that it also impacts other systems in the body and addresses other disease states, including oncology and acute ischemic injury.
In the liver, Birnberg likened AMP kinase to “nature’s statin”, suppressing cholesterol production as well as lowering circulating high triglyceride levels, something the existing statin drugs do control, and the risks of cardiovascular disease that come with them.
For certain cancers AMP kinases activation may suppress tumor growth, he said, citing a recent epidemiological study of diabetics around Dundee, Scotland reporting diabetics treated with metformin had a lower incidence of several types of cancer, including prostate.
Encouraging data in oncology has inspired a collaboration between MTI and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston to study the ability of AMPK activators to suppress human prostate tumor growth in mice.
Birnberg also said he was encouraged by a recent paper by a cardiology group at Yale University reporting that AMPK activation increases the viability of cardiomyocytes that have been deprived of oxygen, suggesting that AMPK activation in the heart following a heart attack may mitigate some of the long-term damage.
At BIO-Europe Spring 2008, Mercury Therapeutics’ Business Development team hopes to find a partner looking to augment their pipeline with a potential blockbuster five to seven years from now.
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