PharmaTelevision - Polyphor Ltd: Developing Innovative Protein Epitope Mimetic Technology

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: Polyphor Ltd: Developing Innovative Protein Epitope Mimetic Technology

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, filmed at BIO in San Diego, Fintan Walton talks to Dr. Jean-Pierre Obrecht CEO, co-founder and Delegate of the Board of Directors of Polyphor Ltd. In July 2008 Polyphor announced the successful completion of its Phase I clinical study on POL6326, a CXCR4 inhibitor, the first trial of its proprietary PEM technology.

Dr. Obrecht describes the evolution of the company and the potential future of the PEM technology following the success of preliminary clinical studies. He tells how Polyphor’s Small Molecule Business Unit supports and helps fund the PEM technology development, which enables Polyphor to not only take POL6326 onto Phase II studies but to begin pre-clinical studies on POL7080, an antibiotic.

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

The origins and proprietory technologies developed by the company.

Fintan Walton:

Hello and welcome to PharmaVentures business Review here live in San Diego, California. On this show, I have Jean-Pierre Obrecht, who is CEO of Polyphor, a company which is based near Basel in Switzerland. Welcome to the show.

Jean-Pierre Obrecht:

Thank you very much and thanks for the invitation. It's a great pleasure to be here.

Fintan Walton:

Good.

Jean-Pierre Obrecht:

Especially in a great moment for our company where we had made a big step in validation of our proprietary technology.

Fintan Walton:

Excellent, well before we go into the detail of that, what I would like to do is to ask you the question around the foundation of your company Polyphor and the origins of the company, Could you tell us that?

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

Jean-Pierre Obrecht

CEO and Delegate of the Board of Directors

Dr. Jean-Pierre Obrecht is the CEO and Delegate of the Board of Directors of Polyphor Ltd, a biotech company he co-founded in 1996. After time in a post-doctoral position at ETH Zurich, Dr Obrecht's experience of the chemical industry began in agrochemical research as head of the production and engineering department of Dr.R.Maag AG. In his last position before founding Polyphor he was responsible for the worldwide logistics of pharma active ingredients at Roche in Basel. Dr. Jean-Pierre Obrecht obtained his Ph.D. in Chemistry from ETH Zurich under the supervision of Professor D. Arigoni in 1982 and an Executive MBA degree from Hochschule St.Gallen in 1990.

Polyphor

Dr. Jean-Pierre Obrecht and his brother, Dr. Daniel Obrecht, founded Polyphor Ltd, a privately owned biotech company, in 1996. Located in Allschwil, Switzerland, it was initially started to provide the pharmaceutical industry with products and services for small molecule drug discovery. Its Small Molecules Business Unit (SMBU) has compiled libraries of small molecules for general and random screening, which can be used to support pharmaceutical companies to find novel hits on a non-exclusive basis. Hits from these libraries can then be optimized with focused libraries strategically synthesized by Polyphor. In 2001, in collaboration with Prof. J. A. Robinson at the University of Zurich, the Protein-Epitope-Mimetics Business Unit (PEMBU) was set up. Run alongside the SMBU this unit allowed Polyphor to conduct its own drug discovery and clinical development programs based on the proprietary PEM technology. This new and innovative technology provides access to fully synthetic, medium sized cyclo-peptide derived molecules that are able to mimic surface patches on proteins, especially at protein-protein interfaces. Hence these molecules can be regarded as functional minimizations of proteins. Their ability to modulate protein-protein interactions and G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) with large ligand binding domains makes them applicable for discovering and optimizing clinical candidates that interfere with targets especially those that are difficult to modulate with small molecules. Polyphor is developing several PEM molecules, the most advanced of these, POL6326- a CXCR4 inhibitor, has just completed Phase I clinical trials and will be taken onto Phase II later this year. As well as concentrating on PEM development Polyphor offers its technology for collaborations on their customer's targets and is also interested in partnering opportunities with large pharmaceutical companies.