Autoimmune treatment a real possibility
By GILLIAN SLADE on May 18, 2019.
A potential treatment for autoimmune diseases like celiac disease, multiple sclerosis and inflammatory bowel disease was discovered at the University of Calgary and is now entering a new phase towards human trials and commercialization worldwide.--SUBMITTED PHOTOgslade@medicinehatnews.com@MHNGillianSlade
A potential treatment for autoimmune diseases like celiac disease, multiple sclerosis and inflammatory bowel disease was discovered at the University of Calgary, and now research is entering a new phase toward human trials and commercialization worldwide.
A licence agreement has been entered into with Parvus Therapeutics and Genentech – a member of the Roche Group.
Parvus Therapeutics was founded by University of Calgary researcher Pere Santamaria in the department of microbiology, immunology and infectious diseases at the Cumming School of Medicine.
“As a researcher, it is a privilege to have the potential opportunity to make an impact on the lives of people who suffer from these conditions,” Santamaria said in a press release.
Navacims is designed to trigger a naturally occurring regulatory mechanism within the immune system to protect against autoimmune disease. This was published in the science journal Nature in 2016.
Pre-clinical disease models with Navacims demonstrated broad therapeutic activity and disease reversal for a range of autoimmune disorders including diabetes, multiple sclerosis, autoimmune liver diseases and irritable bowel syndrome.
“It’s very different from current therapeutics and it could transform treatment options,” said Jord Cowan, vice president of operations for Parvus. “You get to see if all that hard work will pay off for patients and I think that’s what we’re all excited about and why we got into this.”
Autoimmune disease is a condition where a person’s immune system mistakenly attacks healthy cells in the body having incorrectly identified them as foreign, according to a press release. There are more than 80 autoimmune diseases impacting people across the world and million people in Canada are affected.
Cowan says about 10 years ago, as a startup company, they needed investors for pre-clinical activities.
“The Medicine Hat connection was really at a very early stage where we were raising increments of $1 to $2 million to prove the technology worked in animal models. Now, we are sort of moving into the next stage which is gearing up to go into human clinical trials which is where the really big dollars are required,” said Cowan, who is originally from Medicine Hat.
A single drug and a single disease indication costs about $1.5 billion to get it to the point of selling a commercial product, said Cowan.
The increased costs at this stage have a lot to do with regulations.
“It’s a regulatory industry and safety. The regulatory requirements on manufacturing and quality and the expense of the human trials with thousands of patients. It takes a lot of time and money to move these drugs forward.”
While timelines for the human trial phase are confidential, Cowan estimates it could be a decade before this drug is available worldwide, if everything goes according to plan.
