This week we wave goodbye to the United Kingdom and all its glory and through the English channel, we head south to charming Switzerland. Geneva is our destination and it is where Addex Therapeutics, our Biotech of the Week, is based.
City: Geneva (Switzerland)
Founded: 2002
Employees: 5
Market Capitalization: €30M (3/2016)
CEO: Tim Dyer
Mission: Founded in 2002, Addex Therapeutics, a biopharmaceutical company, focuses on the development of novel, orally available, small molecule allosteric modulators for neurological disorders. The company integrated drug development capabilities (e.g in vitro, preclinical and clinical development experts) with relevant experience within the pharmaceutical industry as their key move.
By taking advice from world-renowned researchers and scientists, Addex Therapeutics’ team was able to create and develop significant knowledge on allosteric modulation and were able to improve orally allosteric drugs for unmet medical needs, making them pioneers and main developers on this field.
This week, the company also announced the completion of the mGlu5 receptor occupancy study with dipraglurant with a healthy volunteer. Funded by the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research (MJFF), this trial was conceived to study the brain mGlu5 receptor occupancy by positron emission tomography (PET), following a dosage of dipraglurant in healthy test subjects and find a relation between the dipraglurant plasma and its concentration and the brain mGlu5 receptor occupancy.
Comment: We interviewed the CEO of the company at BIO-Europe Spring in Paris. The company raised over €200M in total, counted almost 160 employees and its most advanced trial was in Phase III, making their path unique, Although, the trial failed and because of additional “management failures”, Addex almost declared bankruptcy, had to fire every employee and is now running as a semi-virtual company. It has interesting collaborations ongoing with top organisations but its market cap (€30M) is still far away from what it raised originally.