December 10, 2015
By Dan Emerson, BioSpace.com News
Based in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park, NovaTarg Therapeutics is a small, early-stage company with a lot of potential. NovaTarg recently got a jump start when the National Institutes of Health authorized two grants, which totaled $3.2 million, to develop drug candidates for polycystic kidney disease and Type 2 diabetes.
NovaTarg was founded in 2009 by former GlaxoSmithKline executive Ken Batchelor with the mission to discover and develop new, more effective molecularly-targeted therapies and companion molecular diagnostics to treat metabolic diseases and cancer. BioSpace spoke with Chief Executive Officer Ken Batchelor about NovaTarg’s drug development plans and prospects.
Competition
Batchelor told BioSpace he expects to announce NovaTarg’s first drug candidates by the middle of next year. NovaTarg‘s work focuses on adenosine monophosphate-activated protein kinase (AMPK), an enzyme that plays a role in cellular energy homeostasis.
“A number of people are working on AMPKs, but we don’t know of anyone else who is doing the same thing as us. We are positioned well to deliver drugs for these indications,” Batchelor said.
According to Batchelor, the market for Type 2 diabetes is highly competitive and diversified with 394 drugs in active development. “The distribution of pipeline programs is not skewed strongly toward any one stage of development, indicating a continuing unmet medical need in this therapeutic area. Also, new drugs are being developed across a wide range of compound classes and, while none is taking the same approach as NovaTarg, some are looking at AMPK activators,” he said.
The top-selling diabetes drugs in 2014 were: Novo Nordisk’s Novolog (includes NovoRapid Novolog $17.45 billion and NovoMix Novolog $9.87 billion), $27.32 billion; Sanofi Aventis’ Lantus, $6.34 billion; Merck & Co.’s Januvia/Janumet, $6 billion; and Lilly’s Humalog, $2.79 billion.
NovaTarg’s Target in Focus
Batchelor had worked with AMPK activators while he was a senior VP of drug discovery at GlaxoSmithKline, a position he held for 10 years. “I just knew this was a very important area for drug discovery,” he told BioSpace. “Pharmaceutical companies had been looking for drugs with this activity for a long time without much success. I realized, ‘This is the “Holy Grail.’”
NovaTarg is expanding on research mostly being done in Paris, Batchelor noted. “We found a very neat way of activating AMPK, largely through targeting mitochondria,” he said.AMPK is important because “it has so many applications for a variety of metabolic diseases such as Type 2 diabetes and polycystic kidney disease,” Batchelor explained. “Both of these are profoundly affected by AMPK.”
NovaTarg’s Leaders
While at GlaxoSmithKline, Batchelor was co-inventor of Avodart, a blockbuster drug for the treatment of BPH. During his 30-plus year career, Batchelor also played a significant role in the discovery and development of a number of drugs for the treatment of cancer, metabolic disease and viral diseases.
The NovaTarg executive team also includes two other former GlaxoSmithKline executives, Vice President of Drug Discovery Jeff Cobb and Vice President of Biology Nick Livingston.
Will Seek Financing Next Year
Batchelor said the grants will finance NovaTarg‘s initial preclinical work and he plans to begin seeking Series A financing in mid-2016.
NovaTarg will generate revenue through sales and co-marketing of its therapeutic and diagnostic products, as well as royalties generated from corporate partners who license its discovery tools for their internal programs, Batchelor said.
For pharma companies, diabetes represents a potentially huge market; some analysts estimate that taking just 1 percent of the market could translate into $1 billion or more in annual sales.
What to Watch For
Batchelor said NovaTarg is working on identifying its initial drug targets for Type 2 diabetes and polycystic kidney disease “entirely in parallel. At this point, we can’t tell which would come first. But, by the middle of next year we should be at the candidate stage.”
