| Name | Title | Contact Details |
|---|
The trillions of microbes that call us home – the human microbiome – perform critical functions that preserve our health including helping develop our immune system, manufacturing nutrients such as vitamins, and harvesting energy from the diet. Alterations of the human microbiome are increasingly recognized as a key factor in autoimmune, metabolic, infectious and many other diseases. For millions of years, humans have co-evolved with this community of microbes, communicating in an ancient language that holds critical clues about how autoimmune and infectious diseases develop. This language is based on a system of signals that our resident microbes use to successfully colonize us, such as byproducts of bacterial metabolism and factors that bacteria use to adapt to human niches. Recent discoveries have shown that most of these signals do not lead to disease, rather, they promote our long-term survival. Vedanta Biosciences is developing an innovative class of therapies that modulate pathways of interaction between the human microbiome and the host immune system. Vedanta Biosciences was co-founded by PureTech and a group of world renowned experts in immunology and microbiology.
Codagenix Inc. is a clinical stage biotechnology company with vaccine products against influenza, respiratory syncytial virus, dengue virus, and others currently under development. Codagenix uses a computer-based algorithm, called SAVE (Synthetic Attenuated Virus Engineering) to design viral genomes that are identical to the wild type strain at the amino acid level, but make less protein in human cells.
ALCON LABORATORIES INC is a Fort Worth, TX-based company in the Healthcare, Pharmaceuticals, and Biotech sector.
Yumanity Therapeutics is transforming drug discovery for neurodegenerative diseases caused by protein misfolding. Despite the fact that an estimated 50 million people worldwide suffer from diseases affecting the brain and central nervous system, there are no approved disease-modifying therapies or cures. Yumanity is working to identify and develop new, disease-modifying therapies that address several illnesses with critical unmet medical needs, including Alzheimer`s disease, Parkinson`s disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). The company`s approach concentrates on correcting the cellular pathologies driven by misfolded proteins, the altered biology or phenotypes driving these diseases. Yumanity Therapeutics was founded in December 2014 by Susan Lindquist, Ph.D., award-winning protein folding expert, and Tony Coles, M.D., a renowned biotech industry leader. The company`s proprietary platforms have already identified one potential new target for treating Parkinson`s disease, and Yumanity is actively advancing its new chemical lead series for this condition, as well as identifying additional compounds for Alzheimer`s disease and ALS. Targeting the underlying protein pathology of neurodegenerative diseases allows the company to discover therapies that may modify the root cause of these rather than only addressing their symptoms.
Abeona Therapeutics (Nasdaq: ABEO) is a fully-integrated gene and cell therapy company at the forefront of the rapidly-advancing field of genetic medicine. The Company`s multi-platform expertise across the manufacture, delivery, development, and discovery of novel gene and cell therapies has it uniquely positioned for success. Underpinning the Company`s robust pipeline is its fully-operational manufacturing facility producing therapies and vectors for preclinical and clinical studies. Abeona is also developing the AIM™ Vector Platform: 100+ next-generation AAV capsids for delivering gene therapies targeting a wide range of organs and multiple routes of delivery. A robust and diverse pipeline is led by a novel gene-corrected cell therapy poised to enter Phase 3 in mid-2019 and complemented by one-time gene therapy candidates across four lysosomal storage diseases. Several preclinical discoveries are led by an emerging program in cystic fibrosis that uses the AIM vector platform and a capsid that has shown potential across inherited and acquired retinal diseases.