"If the pharmaceutical industry were building planes, it would build tens of thousands of types of planes, and see which of them crashes. A lot of them would crash," HQL Pharmaceuticals Ltd. CEO Tal Parnes told "Globes", in explaining the company's drug development process - high throughput screening. In practice, the pharmaceutical industry consumes huge resources.
HQL's founders met in 2001 and talked about the "distorted way drugs were developed," as Parnes puts it. He had no background in the pharmaceutical industry; he was a software entrepreneur and COO of Silynx Communications Inc., a developer of tactical headsets and hearing systems.
HQL VP R&D Dr. Rakefet Rosenfeld is a bioinformatics expert who previously served as VP research at ProCognia (Israel) Ltd. (TASE:PRCG), whom Parnes met by chance at a conference. She told him about her work with Dr. Roberto Olender, who earned his Ph.D. in chemical physics from the Weizmann Institute of Science, who served as associate director of computational development at Epix Pharmaceuticals, and is now CSO at HQL. Rosenfeld and Olender were developing new models for drug discovery.
"The field was hot," says Parnes. Despite the buzz, the field was maturing slowly. "We met with big pharma companies, and they told us, 'If we cooperate with you, and provide you with our most sensitive information, we'd have to kill you.'" He reminisces. The entrepreneurs gave up on the dream, but kept in touch. When they saw that the companies were changing their attitude and considering a new approach, they reestablished their business.
Today, pharmaceutical companies begin the search for a molecule which might become a drug by defining a number of characteristics. The companies scan their databases, which contain millions of molecules. In the next step, these molecules can undergo a chemical or computerizing scan. If the scan is chemical, the molecule is put in a test tube to see the activity on the test molecule. This is a long and expensive process. In a computerized scan, a billion molecules are tested within a few weeks or months. "We can do this within a few days," says Parnes. "We can scan more molecules than there are stars in the sky and grains of sand on the seashore."
"Instead of going for the scanning approach, we use the rule-out approach. Like the game '20 questions', if you ask, 'Is this a man or a woman?' If you say, 'woman', you no longer have to consider men. We built 'super molecules', each of which represents chemical and physical characteristics of trillions of molecules. We examine these super molecules against the molecular target, and if there isn't a good fit, we reject the entire branch of the tree.
"In this way, we can reach several molecular families whose environments should be searched, but our advantage is that these molecules can be completely different from each other. In contrast to the current method, we don’t limit ourselves to a small part of the total basket of molecules found in the world."
HQL has built a library of thousands of 'super molecules', which is its main asset. It has created software for carrying out the proprietary scan which it invented. But the company does not want to be a services vendor for software companies, nor does it want to be a software company itself.
"This is a $300 million market in good times," says Parnes.
The remaining solution is the independent development of drugs, and to development them together with pharmaceutical companies from the preclinical stage.
"Globes": Most pharmaceutical companies are not interested in preclinical drugs. They'll wait for you to make progress on your own, which is an investment that most start-ups cannot afford.
Parnes: "Not necessarily. This is exactly the change that this industry is undergoing. It is prepared to cooperate at earlier stages. We don’t care if we give a pharmaceutical company drugs for a joint development project that will not make rapid progress, or if the amount they'll pay for it is not large, because each project will not cost us a lot."
HQL is currently working on two types of drugs. "One is drugs which disrupt the interaction between two proteins. These are next-generation cancer drugs. The second attacks infections, such as microbes, by inhibiting the action of multiple proteins, which reduces the chances of the microbes developing drug resistance," says Parnes.
HQL hopes to begin animal trials by the end of 2014.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on July 7, 2013
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