PharmaTelevision - EGEN: A Research Driven Business

PharmaTelevision requires Javascript enabled and Adobe Flash Player to watch our programmes. If you do not have Flash installed, you can download it for free from the Adobe Flash homepage.

Improve your Internet experience and start watching exciting new video content.

Video title: EGEN: A Research Driven Business

Visitors: You are watching a 5 minute preview.

Get more information and subscribe now

RSS

Twitter

In This Episode:

Summary
Transcript
Participants
Company

In this interview, filmed in June at BIO in San Diego, Fintan Walton talks to Dr Khursheed Anwer, Senior VP for Research and Development and CSO of EGEN, a speciality biopharmaceutical company based in Alabama. Dr Anwer explains the science behind the company’s proprietary technology and its promising performance in late-stage ovarian cancer patients. He attributes the achievements of the company to strong inter-communication between different scientific disciplines and allowing research to drive the business.

Full video transcripts are available with PharmaTelevision Premium Content. Click here to buy a subscription or sign up for a 14 day free trial.

Company's origins and Proprietary technology

Fintan Walton:

Hello and welcome to pharmaventures business review here at Bio in San Diego California. On this show I have Khursheed Anwer who is chief scientific officer and senior vice president at the company called EGEN which was formerly called Expression Genetics. Welcome to the show.

Khursheed Anwer:

Thank you Fintan Walton good to be here.

Fintan Walton:

Good. Khursheed AnwerEGEN is an interesting company because it is developing these new platforms which all revolve around some interesting technology that's coming up to the pharmaceutical industry that technology is one that people are now familiar with which is interference RNA, siRNA, shRNA and so forth. Tell us about the origins of Expression Genetics and how you got involved in this new exciting area.

Khursheed Anwer:

Very good. Expression Genetics was founded in University of Utah by professor Sung Wan Kim's laboratory and then it was fully operational in July 2002 in University of Alabama and that's when I joined the company and before that I was working with another company Valentis, GeneMedicine which had history of developing DNA therapeutics for quite some time and so I moved to University of Alabama started this company R&D from scratch. Hired very good people locally and then from nationally to really tackle this problem of Nucleic acid therapeutics. Now as you said nucleic acid therapeutics is a powerful tool to treat diseases. You can have a over expression of a good gene that can fight cancer, lower blood glucose level through gene therapy approach. You can also do opposite to it. You can inhibit the expression of a bad gene such as a cancer causing gene, a gene that's belong to virus and cause infection by a very opposite approach which is to inhibit the expression of those proteins and that's as you said gene silencing. So it's a very cutting edge technology. There is no doubt there's no doubt that nucleic acid is going to be a powerful therapeutics but the question is that how you get to the site of their action. For example if it's a DNA therapeutic it has to be at the nucleus where it works as a transcription factors and produce protein. If it is siRNA it has to be inside the cell so from the side of injection to where these therapeutics perform key is delivery and that's only the core of business of Expression Genetics.

Fintan Walton:

Sure

Full video transcripts are available with PharmaTelevision Premium Content. Click here to buy a subscription or sign up for a 14 day free trial.

Khursheed Anwer

CSO and Senior Vice President

Dr Khursheed Anwer, EGEN's CSO and Senior Vice President for Research & Development, joined the company in July 2002 and used his considerable experience in the industry to set up its R&D department. Before joining EGEN, Dr Khursheed Anwer was Director of Pre-Clinical Development at Valentis, Inc, a company with an extensive history of research into DNA therapeutics. From 1993 to 1999 he held a number of positions at GeneMedicine, Inc where he led a number of research projects into non-viral gene therapies, an area of science in which he has authored over forty papers. After obtaining his Ph.D. in Physiology and Pharmacology at Ohio University, Dr Khursheed Anwer spent some time as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston as well as teaching at the University of Alabama.

EGEN

EGEN (formerly Expression Genetics) originated at Professor Sung Wan Kim's laboratory at the University of Utah. Since 2002, the Alabama-based biopharmaceutical company has been developing safe and efficient polymeric delivery systems to be used in creating products for the treatment of human diseases. These systems, based on a synthetic biocompatible polymeric system, can be used to deliver therapeutic genes, siRNA, shRNA and small molecules by protecting the therapeutic cargo from degradation, promoting uptake by the target cells and facilitating intracellular trafficking. The company is currently focused on developing their two proprietary technologies: TheraPlas and TheraSilence. TheraPlas technology (delivery of a therapeutic plasmid) has successfully completed a Phase I clinical trial and is proceeding into expanded human testing, whilst the TheraSilenc technology platform (delivery of therapeuticsiRNA or shRNA) has produced novel candidates that are being tested for proof of concept in animal disease models. In August 2008, EGEN announced the successful completion of its $12 million Series B financing. The funds were required for the further development of EGEN001 – a lead product based on the TheraPlas technology - which was named as one of the ten most promising oncology products by Windhover in September 2008. As an R&D company, EGEN looks for partners to assist them in taking their products through pivotal clinical trials and into marketing.