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Improving lives by enhancing precision cancer diagnostics.
Conversant Biologics is a Huntsville, AL-based company in the Healthcare, Pharmaceuticals, and Biotech sector.
We are a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on discovering and developing best-in-class therapies for patients with liver and gastrointestinal, or GI, diseases. Since our founding in 2014, we have invested in building a foundation of chemistry and biology expertise to drive innovative drug discovery and development. We believe these internal capabilities allow us to gain insights into disease targets and mechanisms and more quickly and purposefully design therapies with characteristics that we view as key to safety and efficacy. With this systematic approach, we have designed novel, proprietary farnesoid X receptor (FXR) clinical product candidates arising from a unique chemical scaffold with the potential to be best-in-class for non-alcoholic steatohepatitis, or NASH, and first- in-class for Inflammatory Bowel Disease, or IBD. In addition to our FXR program, we have continued to invest in drug discovery on other therapeutic targets that have effects on inflammation and/or fibrosis for which we believe we could develop proprietary small molecule therapies.
Arsanis is a leader in the discovery and development of monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) for the targeted immunotherapy of serious infections. Monoclonal antibodies have transformed the treatment of a wide range of diseases from cancer to immune system disorders. In infectious diseases, mAbs can target directly specific pathogens or their virulence mechanisms to avoid pathogenic processes in the infected individual, including resistant strains that give rise to serious infections. Unlike traditional antimicrobials that often target both pathogenic and non-pathogenic organisms in a non-specific way (e.g., broadly killing all Gram-positive bacteria), Arsanis` monoclonal antibodies selectively focus on specific pathogens and pathogenic processes. These targeted immunotherapies address critical infections while minimizing the collateral damage from antimicrobial overuse, resistance, and microbiome disruption. We believe that the ability to selectively and safely target causative pathogens provides a new way of preventing and treating infections in high-risk patients, and can generate both clinical and health economic benefits to patients and providers, ushering in a new era in infection prevention and management.
The mission of 4D Molecular Therapeutics is to design and develop transformative gene therapy products using our proprietary technology to create novel adeno-associated virus variants to be utilized as treatments for serious unmet medical conditions. Our products are unlocking the full potential of gene therapy to treat, and potentially cure, genetic diseases. A large number of patients and diseases, who previously were not treatable by gene therapy, will be addressable by 4D products. 4D has one of the deepest and most diverse product pipelines in the gene therapy field. Adeno-associated virus (AAV) vectors have emerged as a favored delivery vehicle for gene therapy in the human body. They can deliver the genes for therapeutic proteins to accessible tissues in the body and are generally considered safe. Several AAV gene therapy products are in late-stage clinical development, and one product is approved in the EU (Glybera, Uniqure). However, these first-generation AAV vectors have limited utility for the majority of diseases. Many of these common AAV were discovered as laboratory contaminants and monkey infections, for example; they have not been customized as targeted medicines. In contrast, 4D customized AAV vectors, and the products made from them, are designed to unlock the full potential of gene therapy. Through 4D`s Therapeutic Vector Evolution, we are able to create customized vectors solutions to overcome the hurdles identified with first-generation AAV vectors. 4D is creating the ultimate gene therapy products to cure genetic diseases using new customized delivery vehicles (vectors) to shuttle genes into the cells in any organ in the body. This 4D “library” of vectors will soon include several for the liver, several for the brain, several for the heart, the eye, muscle, and so on. Doctors will be able to hand pick a vector for any patient based on the organ that is diseased.