IndoCanadian venture radicalises drug research
TORONTO: A collaboration between Canadian and Indian entities aims to disrupt the development of drugs by making them more affordable and efficient while targeting what is perceived as the coming epidemic of age-related maladies in India.
The partnership will marry bleeding-edge Canadian research to multiple advantages that India brings to the table.
At the Canadian end is the Toronto Recombinant Antibody Center (TRAC), founded and led by Sachdev Sidhu, a professor in the department of molecular genetics at the University of Toronto. TRAC was spun out of Sidhu Lab and is conducting research into nearly 100 disease-countering antibodies.
In India, there’s MedGenome led by serial entrepreneur Sam Santhosh. It is headquartered in San Francisco but has a strong presence in Bangalore.
The platform developed by Sidhu’s team, Synthetic Antibody Engineering, will work with processes India has mastered. As Sidhu said in an interview at his office at the Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research, what they do really well is “cell biology, antibody engineering”.
India brings a complementary strength to the table – its strength in manufacturing derived from generic drug development.
“That’s what India actually excels at – volume, quality. And when you have that drug scaled up, the last step is clinical trials. India is becoming more and more a player in clinical trials,” he said.
At its core, the effort involves drugs based on antibodies, which “fight infection” in the body.
“It’s a protein, so we can engineer it genetically. What we can now make is antibodies which target proteins in our own body. Antibodies bind to the defective protein, for instance that causing hyperproliferation of cells as in cancer, and shut it down,” Sidhu explained.
The pharmaceutical industry has so far been chained to a cycle of creating new drugs, and recently biosimilars, those that ape existing medication. This venture attempts to make “biobetters”, which Santhosh said was a “concept to make an improved drug, look at an existing drug and make it better.”
Sidhu said, “It’s time to retire the old drug with a better one, that’s our simple definition of biobetter. Somehow it’s considered radical.”
Most drugs rely on discoveries made a decade, or even a quarter century ago. These will be “drugs made with current knowledge and technology, that hit proven targets. We want to make it better than existing drugs in key areas – stability, potency and specificity.”
While current drugs considered highly successful are also very expensive, putting them out of the reach of millions in India, this partnership aims to make them “affordable”, at prices a fraction of that now, while bringing them to market quicker.
“The pressure for faster and better drugs is coming from countries like India,” Sidhu said.