Bangalore: Nearly two years after Supreet Deshpande spun off NovaLead Pharma Pvt. Ltd from its parent company VLife Technologies, which was started to bring the discipline of technology to the celebrated serendipity of drug discovery, he has managed to sell his story to the investors, raising $8 million (Rs39 crore) from two private equity (PE) funds based in Mumbai.
Illustration: Jayachandran / Mint
The money will fund clinical trials of some of NovaLead’s molecules, both in India and the US, including one at the Boston University Medical Centre in Massachusetts.
Deshpande claims that one of the most promising drugs in his company’s pipeline of 11 drugs is an existing intravenous drug that his suite of software, and later animal studies, has found to be effective as an ointment in healing diabetic foot ulcer. The next two molecules in advanced stages are for colon and pancreatic cancer.
“Globally, some 280 million people are affected by diabetes, and going by the medical data, 15% of them will develop diabetic foot ulcer of which 25% will lead to amputation,” says Deshpande. He doesn’t want to name the PE funds, one of which is an existing fund; another, part of an industrial house, is a new entrant. Today, hardly any medication exists for diabetic foot ulcers. So, Deshpande is convinced he has an assured market when his drug hits the market two years later.
A mechanical engineer by training, Deshpande came to the pharmaceutical business with the aim of repositioning existing drugs to new indications, also called repurposing. By definition, repurposing is not a new phenomenon; pharmaceutical companies have been doing this for years, but more by serendipity than by hard-nosed science. What small information technology- and biology-driven companies are trying to do now is by design—a systematic uncovering of many activities that existing or abandoned drugs are involved in. This also leads to significant cost reduction in drug development vis-a-vis de novo drug development as safety parameters are already proven and clinical runs are much shorter.
Some noted examples of accidental repurposing are: Viagra, originally developed for hypertension, but later found to be effective in erectile dysfunction; Wellbutrin, a drug first developed to treat depression, but later found another indication in smoking cessation (and is now marketed as Zyban by GlaxoSmithKline Plc). This week, scientists from Stanford University School of Medicine report in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America) that the inexpensive hypertension drug lisinopril may be effective against multiple-sclerosis, a chronic autoimmune disease.