Disruptive gpcr lead discovery platform delivering new and safer therapeutics
InterAx Biotech, a Swiss company and spin-off from the ETH Zürich and the Paul Scherrer Institute has built PICARD, a unique drug discovery platform for the identification of drug candidates with improved efficacy and reduced side effects for the largest class of human receptors: The G-Protein Coupled Receptors (GPCRs). These receptors play a central role in many vital biological processes and they are implicated in a large variety of human diseases. Due to their complex nature and mechanisms that lead to the disease state, only 60 out of 375 pharmacologically relevant GPCRs have been successfully targeted by drugs, leaving >80% GPCRs without therapeutics. Bringing a drug to the market requires an investment of up to €2.2B; out of 5000 compounds only 5 will make it to the clinical trial phase and 9 out of 10 compounds fail during costly clinical trials. This inflates the price of the drugs that reach the patients, making the society paying for inefficiencies of pharmaceutical R&D. PICARD will enable better and earlier detection of safety and efficacy profiles of GPCR-targeting drugs by increasing quality and reducing costs and time-to-market of new therapeutics. The novelty of our discovery platform lies on the combination of our screening to find novel compounds, signalling Assays that cover the most common GPCR activation aspects and our Systems Biology approach leading to highly efficient and fast delivery of functional-selective compounds. We offer custom-designed PICARD services to pharmaceutical and biotech companies that are outsourcing key stages of their drug discovery process lowering risks and greatly reducing R&D costs. The revenue stream is generated both from fee per service and from long-term drug discovery partnerships with upfront and milestone payments. We estimate reaching break-even 2 years after commercialization with 45 FTE and achieving a ROI of 4.5.