Spin-out Zyentia Ltd helps Osteoporosis Sufferers

1st September 2006

Zyentia Ltd, Oxford University's latest spin-out company from the Chemistry Department, the third within the last half year, is based on technology that has the potential to solve major problems in protein therapies.

Zyentia Ltd

The company’s technology was developed by its academic founder, Professor Chris Dobson FRS, formerly Director of the Oxford Centre for Molecular Science, who is now at the University of Cambridge. Other scientific members of the team are Dr Jesús Zurdo and Dr Cait MacPhee, and the company’s general manager is Dr Philip Ledger, former Managing Director of Circassia Ltd and Peptech UK.

It is becoming increasingly recognised that numerous apparently unrelated diseases result from incorrect protein folding, leading to aggregation and fibril formation. Similar phenomena are also encountered by biotechnology companies trying to produce pure human proteins in recombinant systems, resulting in low yields, low product stability, and the possible administration of altered molecules that are of reduced activity and may even display toxicity.

By exploring the rules determining the formation of structural components of proteins, the Zyentia team have developed ways of identifying key residues in the primary sequence of polypeptides and substituting them in such a way that stability of “normal” conformation is enhanced, and there is less tendency for proteins to pass into the inactive, aggregation-prone state.

The first therapeutic molecule to be improved in this way has been calcitonin. This is widely used in the treatment of osteoporosis as salmon calcitonin, because of the strong tendency for human calcitonin to aggregate. By changing a small number of amino acids, Zyentia Ltd has developed a stable form of human calcitonin that could be of increased potency and would avoid side effects seen with the use of the salmon form. Other routes of exploitation for the company’s technology will be the understanding of diseases which are associated with protein aggregation, and the development of new materials based on the controlled aggregation of specific proteins.

Zyentia Ltd is the third company which has been set up following the joint venture between Oxford University and IP2IPO, giving IP2IPO a share of the University’s equity entitle-ment spun out of the Chemistry Department in return for a £20m donation towards state-of-the-art laboratories.

Press release sign up