The strategic venture fund GlaxoSmithKline set up to invest in companies advancing neuromodulation technology is not the first venture fund it’s developed. But it’s part of an evolution in the big pharma company’s investment strategy by putting a greater emphasis on collaboration inside and outside its business.
One way of thinking about what this part of medicine involves is to look at some examples of neuromodulation devices such as cochlear implants, brain-machine interfaces for prosthetic limbs, pacemakers, deep brain stimulation for Parkinson’s disease and cochlear and retinal implants.
In an interview with MedCity News, Imran Eba, a partner on the Action Potential Venture Capital fund, said the multipronged approach GSK is taking to bioelectronics — with a research and development unit in England, establishing a grant program to encourage university researchers coupled and the fund– means there will be a lot more collaboration with academic institutions and the company.
When Investment Rhymes with Canada
Canada has a proud history of achievement in the areas of science and technology, and the field of biomanufacturing and life sciences is no exception.
It’s in the process of offering up to 20 exploratory research grants and creating a network of investigators. It wants to integrate a broader research community and is working with other major funding and research organisations interested in the field. Basically, it’s assembling an ecosystem for bioelectronics.
Eba said he expects most of its investments to be with early stage companies at around $1 million each, but later stage companies would warrant larger investments of $5 million to $7 million.
Its original venture fund, SR One, has been around since 1985, but its investments have not driven collaboration with GSK to the extent that Action Potential and its grant program will.
“We’re going out and interacting with academics that we did not interact with before,” said Eba. “What we’re finding is this is an active space, but it’s very disparate.”
Bioelectronics involves bringing together a wide spectrum of disciplines — neurosciences, biology, engineering, material sciences, neurosurgery. For its part GSK’s bioelectronics unit will focus on biology, neurosciences and engineering.
Underscoring the point in an article in Nature published in April, GSK’s vice president for its bioelectronics R&D unit Kristoffer Famm talked about how different disciplines will need to understand, if not speak, other languages. “Researchers will need to embrace the languages and tools of other fields,” he wrote. “Much of the challenge lies in translating biological understanding into engineering specifications.”
He also set out some parts of its to-do list:
“The first logical step towards electroceuticals is to better map the neural circuits associated with disease and treatment. This needs to happen on two levels. On the anatomical level, researchers need to map disease-associated nerves and brain areas and identify the best points for intervention. On the signalling level, the neural language at these intervention points must be decoded, so that researchers can develop a ‘dictionary’ of patterns associated with health and disease states — a project synergistic with international drives to map the human brain.”
Eba said the fund is adding two to three more partners in the next six months and expects there to be 10 people altogether.
The first investment the fund made was $5 million with SetPoint Medical, a company that has demonstrated proof of concept. The company is developing an implantable device to treat rheumatoid arthritis and other chronic conditions. One of the other investors in the $27 million round the company announced today was Boston Scientific.
But in addition to providing a more targeted way of treating chronic conditions, some see the potential to create treatments that are more cost effective than traditional medication. And when it comes to chronic conditions and the substantial patient populations that have them, it could make a difference.
In an interview with SetPoint Medical CEO Anthony Arnold, he said “We believe the cost of our therapy over a 10-year period would be $50,000 compared with $300,000 to $400,000 for [current] drug therapies.” That could make it more attractive from a reimbursement by payers, depending on the outcomes of clinical trials.
