Pharmaceutical testing company ChanTest has achieved several “firsts” in its 13 years, most related to the company’s drug discovery work with electricity-producing proteins called ion channels.
Add another: The Cleveland-area company has been chosen as the first recipient of MedCity Media’s “The Cities” Healthcare Ally award, given to a service provider that has demonstrated extraordinary service to healthcare. “The Cities” awards honor the best, brightest and most innovative in Cleveland’s healthcare scene.
ChanTest helps its clients by making the drug development process faster and cheaper. The company works with the world’s largest drug companies, such as Eli Lilly, Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline, to screen drug candidates to find the ones most likely to become safe and effective pharmaceuticals.
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“We’re developing drugs that are going to improve the quality of life and safety for a whole bunch of diseases,” Founder and Chief Science Officer Arthur “Buzz” Brown said. “Nobody else in the world can do what we can do with this particular set of drug targets.”
To understand what ChanTest does — Brown calls the 70-employee company a “niche clinical research organization” — it’s necessary to gain a little insight into what ion channels are. Think of them as valves in cell membranes that open and close to let certain ions (such as potassium or sodium, for example) in and out.
Ion channels make up about 10 percent of all drug targets, according to Brown, and are linked to a long list of diseases, including cystic fibrosis, diabetes, cardiac arrhythmias, neurologic and psychiatric diseases, gastrointestinal disorders, and hypertension. ChanTest has developed the world’s largest library of ion channel drug targets, Brown said.
He likens the company’s research process to a giant funnel. At the top are hundreds of thousands of drug candidate compounds that are tested for their effects on ChanTest’s library of drug targets. Those hundreds of thousands of compounds likely yield two or three promising drug candidates that go on to be tested in animals.
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“We toss everything but the kitchen sink at a bunch of targets and see what sticks,” Brown said.
The company’s strong reputation in the industry helped it earn a research contract with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration earlier this summer. The deal calls for ChanTest to develop a large database of side effects associated with cardiac drugs, as well as a model to predict whether in-development drugs are likely to pose a risk to cardiac health.
As for the company’s future, Brown says it’s in “growth mode.” He points to a 2009 acquisition of Maryland-based Applied Cell Sciences as an example of ChanTest’s endeavors to broaden its expertise.
“We plan to expand our offerings,” he said. “We have a fair bit of cash and we’re looking for an acquisition.”
