KineMed employs both pathway-based drug discovery and translational medicine-enabled drug development. President and CEO David Fineman discusses its ground-breaking technology.
US company KineMed was founded in 2001 to provide solutions to fundamental problems in disease management and drug development. Since then it has been breaking new ground and making new discoveries in medical science, by pioneering the use of in vivo molecular kinetics to guide drug discovery and development.
Written by Abigail Saltmarsh & Produced by Thomas Venturo
President and CEO David Fineman explains that KineMed’s overwhelming success over the past decade is based on its unique “pathway-based” technology. “This is based on our ability to identify drugs with true therapeutic effect - more specifically, biochemical effects that have intrinsic functional significance and therefore predict clinical response. This is achieved by measuring the kinetics of key metabolic pathways,” he says.
“By screening compounds against these dynamic targets– ones that are the etiological basis for important diseases - KineMed can rapidly demonstrate a drug’s on-mechanism activity in both animals and patients, as well unexpected or off-target effects.”
David Fineman cofounded the company, located in Emeryville, California, along with Marc Hellerstein, MD PHD who now chairs the scientific advisory board.
“Marc is the intellectual father of this technology,” explains David. “He is also a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where he occupies an endowed chair. Marc has spent the last 20 years inventing and developing the underlying technology that establishes our drug development programs and that we licence exclusively from the University of California.”
A unique technology
KineMed’s business strategy is to actively pursue strategic relationships for both clinical drug development and drug discovery collaborations, while also looking for optimal in-licensing opportunities in its core areas (metabolism, atherosclerosis, diabetes and inflammation/fibrosis). Its annual revenues are in the region of $9 million - $10 million, gained largely through its collaborations with pharmaceutical companies in helping them develop pipeline compounds.
Currently the company is working on core development programs focusing on atherosclerosis, diabetes, fibrosis and osteoarthritis. Discoveries in neurogenesis and neurodegeneration fill out the portfolio.
The underlying philosophy of KineMed’s unique approach is that direct monitoring of the response to drug treatment of complex, interconnected, biological and physiologic systems (involving the output of all associated genes and proteins) allows guided, or rational, drug development.
The response of integrated molecular pathways embedded in a complex biochemical network – the cell and organism- to manipulation of an isolated target is extremely difficult to predict.
KineMed’s approach is to measure the drug’s ability to modulate the complex central pathways that drive the etiology of each particular disease. In this manner, targeted effects can be rapidly confirmed or refuted; unexpected therapeutic actions can be identified, patented and developed; and off-target adverse actions can also be detected early on.
“A typical biomarker measurement involves giving animals or patients a small amount of heavy water or other stable isotope-labeled tracer,” explains David…
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