Pasadena’s EvoRx Technologies Completes Year-long Collaboration with Major Global Biopharmaceutical

Pasadena-based biotechnology company EvoRx Technologies has completed a year-long research collaboration with the global biopharmaceutical firm AstraZeneca aimed at improving drug delivery to treat patients with diseases that have not been accessible with traditional strategies.

The collaboration leveraged EvoRx’s proprietary Evo-Link technology which aims to rapidly develop more potent and cell permeable peptide compounds that can be orally administered to treat patients especially with respiratory diseases.

At the end of the research work, EvoRx reported that their team had successfully generated peptides that could eventually result in a more potent drug-delivery process, which is the primarily goal of the collaboration.

“This collaboration allowed us to further validate our unique approach in successfully targeting intracellular protein-protein interactions thought to be undruggable,” Stephen Fiacco, EvoRx CEO, said. “Our new therapeutic paradigm has the potential to be a game changer for many patients with diseases that so far have not been accessible with traditional strategies in drug discovery. This opens the door for novel treatment across many therapeutic areas.”

EvoRx said nearly 70 percent of proteins implicated in diseases are considered “undruggable,” or inaccessible to drugs using traditional treatment approaches. The company’s Evo-Link technology seeks to address this deficiency.

Dr. Maarten Kraan, head of the Respiratory, Inflammation and Autoimmune Diseases Innovative Medicines Unit at AstraZeneca, said they were able to make “very significant progress on the permeability problem” of their peptides with the collaboration with EvoRx.

“Many disease targets are intractable to both small molecule and biologic therapy, limiting our options to discover new treatments for these life-threatening and debilitating diseases,” Kraan said. “Designing potent, stable, cell penetrating peptides is also one of our industry’s biggest challenges, and so we are delighted with the outcome of our collaboration with EvoRx Technologies.”

AstraZeneca will continue to develop the cell-penetrating peptides after the end of the collaboration.

EvoRx, with offices and laboratories at 129 N. Hill Avenue in Pasadena, is a privately held company founded in 2011 which strives to develop innovative peptide therapeutics and targeted radiopharmaceuticals for treatment and diagnosis of diseases.

More information about the company and its work is available at their website, www.evorxtechnologies.com.