| Derby firm N4 Pharma working on a single-jab vaccine for Hepatitis B By Derby Telegraph | Posted: June 04, 2015
By Paul Whyatt  N4 Pharma founder and CEO Nigel Theobald is working to improve the efficiency of a hepatitis vaccination.
Comments (0) DRUGS are there to make people better – but who makes the drug better?
Step forward Derby.
More specifically, step forward Chellaston company N4 Pharma, founded by pharmaceutical expert Nigel Theobald.
He set up the drug reformulation firm to create better versions of existing drugs.
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Its work is exciting, not least because it has the potential to save millions of lives.
Take hepatitis B, for example. Thirty-three years have elapsed since a three-dose vaccine against the disease was brought to market. Yet, astonishingly, an estimated million people are still killed by it every year.
Clearly, a problem exists. Not only does Nigel know what that is, N4 Pharma is making huge strides in coming up with the answer: a one-dose vaccine.
"It's a horrendous disease and it should have been eradicated years ago," explains Nigel, as we meet at Quad cafe in Derby's Market Place.
"But, in the developing world, it's really hard to ensure everyone gets three jabs. We're trying to do a new version that means people only need one dose.
"Currently, global coverage for a three-dose vaccine programme is 79% and we want to get that up to 100% by introducing a single-jab programme. There's no reason why we can't achieve that level of coverage. It all comes from reforming the existing vaccine."
Bringing the dosage down to one will save money as well as lives, so Nigel is confident of securing funding from the World Health Organisation to start rolling the reformulated vaccine out.
It has been developing using Nuvac – an innovative vaccine delivery system that loads the vaccine antigen into a nano-carrier which improves the ability of the vaccine to kill virus cells, increase antibody production and reduce the number of doses required.
"Large pharmaceutical companies are trying to come up with new vaccines for Hepatitis B," said Nigel. "This vaccine works – it's just not efficient. We just need to improve it's efficiency.
"It can take ten years and £1 billion to bring a new drug to market and there's a 93% failure rate. So what we do is focus on drugs that work but have problems.
"The large pharmaceutical companies don't redevelop. They focus on developing new drugs all the time, which is bizarre.
"It costs about £5 million and takes two to three years to reform a drug, which a success rate of over 80%. That's a real tip in the balance as it's low-risk and high-reward – unlike £1 billion, 10 years and 93% failure."
N4 Pharma, in Bradgate Park View, has a small team as much of its work is outsourced. Working alongside Nigel is chief medical officer James Sawyer, who held roles at three major pharma companies – Sanofi, AstraZeneca and Roche – prior to founding Prism Ideas in 2001. Nigel Brooksby, who worked in the US and UK for Pfizer, is the chairman.
Together, they are redeveloping four drugs: the hepatitis B vaccine; a faster version of sildenafil (Viagra); itraconazole for fungal infections; and alendronate, which is used to treat osteoporosis.
Nigel said: "All these drugs are effective but they've got problems. Viagra takes an hour before it works, itraconazole requires a very high dose as its so insoluble, and alendronate requires you to be upright for 30 minutes after you take it.
"The joke in the industry with alendronate is that it's the Sunday Church drug, as you know you're going to be kneeling a long time once you've had it. It causes such bad stomach problems but we can do a new version that reduces the level of gut intolerance."
Viagra, meanwhile, is worth billions to pharma giant Pfizer but sales have fallen against competition from products that work faster.
Last year, N4 Pharma announced it had the chemistry to enhance the little blue love pill but that it would take £2 million to develop the new version.
Now Nigel says hepatitis B is his number-one focus. He said: "Viagra might take a back seat as we haven't got the funds yet. We're still in discussions. Our work on hepatitis B is growing very fast and we've had excellent initial pre-clinical results, so we're putting a lot more into that."
There are more drugs Nigel's team could work with – but the level of initial investment is steep.
He said: "We've identified 50 drugs that we think there's an opportunity to reformulate. To begin work on all 50, I would need 50 lots of £250,000 – £12.5 million.
"We have to focus on the ones we can bring to market the quickest."
Read more: http://www.derbytelegraph.co.uk/Derby-company-working-single-jab-vaccine/story-26621106-detail/story.html#ixzz3c96ZXkY8
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发表于 2015-6-5 09:15
