| Name | Title | Contact Details |
|---|
Tanox, Inc. is a Houston, TX-based company in the Healthcare, Pharmaceuticals, & Biotech sector.
MicuRx mission is to discover and develop safer and more convenient antibiotics to combat drug-resistant bacterial infections. Multi-drug resistant (MDR) infections represent a major global threat to the public health, routinely forcing the use of antibiotics with high incidence of adverse effects. To combat resistant infections, physicians may increase dosing of antibiotics, or resort to less safe agents, pushing the safety envelope. Thus, healthcare providers and regulatory agencies increasingly face a difficult choice of balancing the risk of infection against unacceptably high adverse event rates from an effective but relatively toxic antibiotic. For example, in July 2016, FDA imposed a new labeling warning on the toxicity of fluoroquinolones, further restricting the use of this essential class, exemplified by anti-pseudomonal agent ciprofloxacin. Anti-MRSA agent linezolid (Zyvox®) is often used beyond its approved 14-day therapy, resulting in several myelosuppression-associated adverse effects listed in the black box warning for this important drug. MicuRx is addressing the critical need for effective but safer therapeutics by designing novel new compounds with reduced toxicity and adverse events while maintaining excellent clinical efficacy.
Aldagen is a Durham, NC-based company in the Healthcare, Pharmaceuticals, and Biotech sector.
Protagonist Therapeutics is a biotechnology company pursuing the discovery and development of target oral peptides as well differentiated alternatives to antibodies, and also as new chemical entities (NCEs) against those targets and life threatening diseases for which suitable small molecule and/or biologic options are not available. Peptides typically suffer from limitations of poor proteolytic stability and therefore find scarce therapeutic utility that is largely limited to ‘injectable drugs’. Protagonist’s technology platform is aimed at overcoming these restrictions and expanding the scope of peptide therapeutics to address unmet needs. Specific emphasis is placed on identifying ‘orally stable’ scaffolds and/or engineering oral stability characteristics onto them. The platform has been optimized over the years and involves synergistic integration of rational drug design, diversity oriented computational tools, phage display libraries, recombinant peptide expression, ex vivo oral stability methods, and peptide/medicinal chemistry techniques. This activity has led to the identification of ‘privileged scaffolds’ with favorable oral stability characteristics. Furthermore, the technology platform is well suited both for de novo discovery against a target and optimization around a given chemical starting point.
Vaxcyte is a vaccine innovation company engineering high-fidelity vaccines to protect humankind from the consequences of bacterial diseases. The Company is developing broad-spectrum conjugate and novel protein vaccines to prevent or treat bacterial infectious diseases. Vaxcyte`s lead candidate, VAX-24, is a 24-valent, broad-spectrum pneumococcal conjugate vaccine being developed for the prevention of invasive pneumococcal disease. Vaxcyte is re-engineering the way highly complex immunizations are made through modern synthetic techniques, including advanced chemistry and the XpressCFᵀᴹ cell-free protein synthesis platform, exclusively licensed from Sutro Biopharma, Inc. Unlike conventional cell-based approaches, the Company`s system for producing difficult-to-make proteins and antigens is intended to accelerate its ability to efficiently create and deliver high-fidelity vaccines with enhanced immunological benefits. Vaxcyte`s pipeline also includes VAX-XP, a PCV with an expanded breadth of coverage of greater than 30 strains; VAX-A1, a prophylactic vaccine candidate designed to prevent Group A Strep infections; and VAX-PG, a therapeutic vaccine candidate designed to slow or stop the progression of periodontal disease. Vaxcyte is driven to eradicate or treat invasive bacterial infections, which have serious and costly health consequences when left unchecked.