EpiVax enters into joint venture to design and manufacture ‘biosuperiors’

EPIVAX AND SCHROEDINGER have created a new company, Aceno Therapeutics, to design
EPIVAX AND SCHROEDINGER have created a new company, Aceno Therapeutics, to design "biosuperior" treatments for diseases that are expected to deliver the positive treatments of biologics without many of the negative side effects.

PROVIDENCE – EpiVax Inc., the Rhode Island-based vaccine designer and maker of protein therapeutics, has formed a joint venture with Schroedinger LLC, a leading computational chemistry provider for life sciences and materials firms, to design “biosuperior” therapies to treat a range of diseases.
Aceno Biotherapeutics, as the company will be known, will tap into the global biologics market, which according to EpiVax founder and CEO Dr. Anne S. De Groot, was a $234 billion market in 2014, roughly 20 percent of the total drug market, a portion that is expected to grow. The new venture, which is to be clinically based in Providence, with administrative and finance offices in New York, is expected to improve on the efficacy of biologic therapies by using EpiVax’s molecular engineering technology that cuts down on potential negative patient reactions to the therapies.
EpiVax brings its immunoinformatics design toolbox as well as its proprietary immune-modulating sequences (known as Tregitopes) to the partnership with Schroedinger, which has a “in silico” molecular modeling platform that is expected to cut down the time to testing and market for the products the new venture will develop. At the core of EpiVax’s competitive advantage is the Tregitope, which induces tolerance to therapeutic molecules which attack the targeted disease, according to the company, a technology whose intellectual property is protected.
De Groot, who introduced the new venture in San Francisco on Monday, is one of four co-founders of Aceno. The other four principal co-founders are EpiVax Chief Operating Officer Bill Martin, as well as Schroedinger President Ramy Farid and Senior Vice President, Business Development Cony D’Cruz, who will serve as the new company’s interim CEO.
“The global biologics market is … expect to reach $386 billion by the end of 2019,” De Groot said in a statement. “The Immune Engineering approach developed at Aceno Biotherapeutics will … re-engineer high-value biologics. This exciting new venture promises to bring superior drugs, with defined mechanisms of action and well-known safety and efficacies, to market.”
While the company will not have its own staff during its startup phase, using instead the assets of the two partners, it is expected that there will be job growth in the near future, although no numbers were released at the announcement of the venture. And while no announcement of external funding for Aceno was announced, a projected use of funds through the first three years of the project shows nearly $5.5 million in research and development, and general and administrative expenses in that time.
As an example of where Aceno might be in a few years, De Groot pointed to a prior Schroedinger venture, Nimbus Therapeutics LLC, a 2009 joint effort that so far has attracted $72 million in investments.

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