The pharmaceutical industry is burdened by high attrition rates and slow development timelines for new drugs, particularly cancer drugs, much-needed to combat the ever-growing challenge that currently claims over 10 million lives per year. Eight out of nine drug candidates fail clinical trials, with a majority of failures attributed to unanticipated human toxicity, despite having undergone a battery of cell-based and animal studies. In addition, tumour relapse and acquired therapy resistance is a core problem precluding improvement in long-term survival. Epigenetic therapies, or ‘epidrugs’ are now used in oncology to treat previously uncurable cancers and to circumvent common cancer resistance mechanisms. However, several bottlenecks remain for bringing safe, effective and affordable epidrugs to the clinic. We have created a platform for high-throughput, low-cost elucidation of action and toxicology of epigenetic drugs. A startup company, Epigenica AB, has been founded. Two patents have been filed by Epigenica AB protecting the technology and applications. A broader IP strategy and freedom-to-operate analysis has been performed as part of the project.
Stakeholders in pharmaceutical industry and diagnostics have been identified and engaged in plans for pilot experiments. A market analysis has been performed.
Our multiplexed workflow enables comprehensive, combinatorial, quantitative, epigenetic profiling on a large number of samples. Its impact lies in reducing attrition and accelerating time-to-market for epigenetic cancer drugs (and drugs in general) by providing a new dimension for cell-based drug efficacy and toxicology screening, identifying toxic epigenetic alterations that could otherwise only be revealed at later-stage animal trials or in-human tests. Our platform will be a breakthrough technology for the pharma industry to make epigenomic screening part of the drug development pipeline, reduce costs and improve productivity while selecting the best drug candidates.
