PharmaTelevision - Karus Therapeutics: Better Medicines from Selective HDAC Inhibitors

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: Karus Therapeutics: Better Medicines from Selective HDAC Inhibitors

Visitors: You are watching a 30 seconds preview.

Get more information and subscribe now

RSS

Twitter

In This Episode:

Summary
Transcript
Participants
Company

In this interview, Fintan Walton speaks with Simon Kerry, CEO of Karus Therapeutics, an emerging biotechnology company founded as a spin-out from the University of Southampton in 2005 to focus on the discovery and development of new drugs to treat cancer and inflammatory disease. The company's focus is the development of a new family of optimised, highly-potent and highly-selective histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitors (HDI's) which the company believes have the potential to become best-in-class treatments for cancer and inflammation. Karus has completed two rounds of venture funding, and is now looking to conventional VC funds for a third round of financing, to be completed by the end of 2008. Dr Kerry anticipates significant growth for Karus over the next few years as it moves its first three programmes into the clinic for the treatment of cancer, psoriasis, and rheumatoid arthritis.

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

Specific technologies of Karus Therapeutics.

Fintan Walton :

Hello and welcome to PharmaVentures Business Review here in Madrid. On this show I have Simon Kerry, who is CEO of Karus Therapeutics based in Southampton in England, welcome to the show.

Simon Kerry :

Thank you.

Fintan Walton :

Simon Kerry , Karus Therapeutics as I said is based in Southampton it came out of University of Southampton and it has some very specific technologies, could you tell us more about Karus Therapeutics?

Simon Kerry :

Of course yeah. And so Karus Therapeutics came out of really two key institutions in Southampton. The first is the Cancer Research UK clinical centre they are based in Southampton General hospital amongst really essential mechanism in understanding how disease cells use their genes very differently from normal cells and that's a key question in biology research, because a cancer cell has the same DNA as a healthy cell but it's clearly using it in different way. And what the guys at CRUK in Southampton are trying to understand is how you can reverse those effect, how you can make a cancer cell stop behaving like a normal cell again. Those biological insights were very important for founding of Karus Therapeutics and Professor Graham Packham who is one of our founders now has an active program one of which aspects which is looking at histone-deacetylase-Inhibitors, HDAC-Inhibitors. HDAC-Inhibitors were important class of compound because they've been shown to do exactly what I've just said, you can take a disease cell like a cancer cell well it could also be an inflammatory cell with number o f other diseases which have genes being used inappropriately I can make that cell stop behaving normally again, okay it does that by regulating the activation of genes.

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

Simon Kerry

CEO

Dr. Simon Kerry is a business professional with over a decade of experience in creating and developing innovative life-science companies. Before joining Karus Therapeutics in 2006, he was Director of Business Development at Ablynx NV (Ghent, Belgium) where he played a key role in the company's rapid growth, which included securing major licensing agreements with top-ten pharmaceutical companies. Prior to Ablynx NV, Dr. Simon Kerry was Director of Business Development at Isogenica (Cambridge, UK) and Active Biotech (Lund, Sweden) and has held other key commercial appointments at Actinova and Actinova (both Cambridge, UK) and at CAMR (Salisbury, UK). He has a PhD in medicinal chemistry and an executive MBA from Loughborough University Business School.

Karus Therapeutics

Karus Therapeutics was created in July 2005 when scientists from the University of Southampton's schools of chemistry and medicine joined forces to develop novel drugs known as histone-deacetylase-HDAC-inhibitors. Karus Therapeutics received "750,000 at its formation, a record level of joint seed corn funding from IP2IPO, the early stage technology transfer specialists, and the SULIS fund, a seed fund owned by the University of Southampton, Bath, and Bristol. Karus Therapeutics sits at the interface of innovative medicinal chemistry and unique insights in cancer cell biology creating opportunities to design, optimize, and develop new medicines. This multi-disciplinary collaboration has resulted in an extensive portfolio of new therapeutics of which Karus Therapeutics's HDAC-inhibitor(HDI) programme is a major component. The company has also initiated HDI programmes in rheumatoid arthritis and cardiovascular disease and is establishing a platform of non-HDI cancertherapeutics.