At its two state-of-the-arts- research centres in Turku (Finland) and Radebeul (Germany), Biotie has numerous ongoing efforts focused on the discovery of novel drug development candidates. These drug discovery efforts, which have successfully fuelled Biotie’s development pipeline in the past, are expected to generate additional drug candidates in the future. Our products are covered by a wide portfolio of patents protecting the intellectual property rights, which are at the heart of our business strategy. Therefore, our patent strategy aims to uphold and further strengthen this protection for its current and future product candidates.
Biotie has a distinguished group of skilled scientists in its discovery and development group, who have the know-how and ability to identify, optimize and develop new, drug-like small molecule compounds and biological entities that potently and selectively tackle a variety of molecular targets. Our current discovery efforts are highly focused in areas of central nervous system and infl ammatory diseases and are aimed at the discovery and development of selective inhibitors of VAP1-SSAO, novel phosphodiesterase inhibitors (“PDE”) and 2ß1 integrin inhibitors all of which could potentially treat a variety of diseases with high unmet medical need.
Drug discovery is a complex and frequently non straightforward process, in which success highly depends on the ability of interdisciplinary teams to bring together all of the relevant expertise in order to catalyze the drug discovery process. Biotie has strong in-house expertise and skills in disease biology areas of infl ammation, neurology and psychosis and combines these with creative medicinal chemistry to generate structure-activity relationships during the lead optimization process through its ample experience in the fi elds of medicinal chemistry, molecular modelling, molecular biology, biochemical screening and other disciplines. Furthermore, Biotie uses an extensive portfolio of disease stage pharmacological models, and screens for drug metabolism, pharmacokinetic and toxicological properties of its drug candidates early on in the discovery and development process in order to identify appropriate drug-like compounds as potential clinical development candidates.
Early discovery and development at the company is bolstered by strong partnerships with academic institutions and pharmaceutical companies such as Roche and Pfi zer for which the collaboration arrangements were carefully adapted to the individual needs of each of the respective collaborative program.
During the fi rst half of 2009, Biotie completed the integration of its German subsidiary after the acquisition of elbion GmbH. As a result of this, all discovery program were carefully assessed and it was decided to focus the company on the program which have the highest probability of success in yielding clinical development candidates in the future. Research teams were re-aligned and organized across the most promising discovery activities. We decided to abandon certain areas of research and to focus on the following three discovery areas:
VAP1-SSAO inhibitors: Beyond its antibody program, Biotie has an ongoing program to discover and develop small molecule inhibitors of VAP-1 SSAO to treat infl ammatory or metabolic diseases. The company’s VAP-1 SSAO small molecule inhibitors are intended to be orally administered drugs. This program is currently in the lead optimisation phase.
Novel phosphodiesterase (PDE) inhibitors: Biotie has developed exceptional expertise in the development of phosphodiesterase inhibitors which interfere with the initiation and propagation of biological signals in the so-called signal transduction cascade. There are eleven different phosphodiesterase families, of which Biotie has established screening models for most of them. Beyond the joint research project with Pfi zer on the discovery of PDE10 inhibitors as described earlier, ongoing efforts to discover and to optimize lead candidates of selective inhibitors of other phosphodiesterases are currently underway. Patent applications have already been fi led for some of these.
alpha2beta1 integrin program: These molecules have the potential to treat a variety of diseases. Biotie’s efforts are centered around certain candidates that have shown promising activity in several models of infl ammatory conditions and lead optimization for these is currently ongoing. Biotie has fi led patent applications for selective alpha2beta1 integrin inhibitors.
---
Updated March, 2010