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Alydar Enlists Infochemicals for Drug Discovery
Company Based in California and Israel
 "Over the last few years, much of the focus of the life sciences industry has been on discovering new drug targets," says Dr. Rivka Sherman-Gold, president and CEO of Alydar Pharmaceuticals, a start up company with a unique approach to drug discovery. "Today, the industry has come to the point at which we have more drug targets than we know what to do with, but where are the drugs themselves?"
This is the question that drives Alydar, the company that Sherman-Gold heads from the San Francisco Bay Area but which has its origins, founding R&D operations and financial backing in Israel. The company is developing a library of potential drugs based upon a naturally occurring set of compounds known as infochemicals or, by their more scientific name, semiochemicals. These compounds act as chemical messengers in nature, carrying information between members of the same species or from one species to another. They are produced by all species, ranging from low-level organisms, plants and insects to marine life and mammals, including humans. They elicit physiological, developmental and behavioral responses and, critical to science and the drug discovery process, their structure and action is often well understood.
"Much of drug discovery today begins with random chemical compounds, which have no known biological activity," said Sherman-Gold. "Many drug discovery companies have focused on screening huge random libraries of chemical compounds, with the hope of finding chemicals that may be active for a certain target." The process is not unlike looking for a needle in a haystack.
"Another way to find new drugs is to do molecular modeling of a particular drug target, and try to synthesize a chemical that will interact with it. Theoretically, both of these approaches should work well, but in reality it hasn’t worked out as hoped," she said.
"By looking at infochemicals, however, we’re starting at a point where we know the compound has biological activity, with well-documented molecular level interaction," Sherman-Gold maintained. Alydar has established a library of pure, synthetic compounds whose structures are based on well-characterized natural infochemicals. The company intends to use these compounds as the basis for collaborations with life sciences companies that have discovered novel drug targets, and that will test Alydar’s bioactive infochemicals on their system to find new drug interactions. Additionally, Alydar will use its infochemical library in its own R&D activities, including disease-specific screening programs focused on cardiac and neurological disorders, and cancer.
Alydar was established in 1999 by Medison Biotech, the investment arm of the Israel-based Medison Group, which includes Medison Pharma, a provider of marketing operations and clinical trial services in Israel for a broad range of international partners, including Biogen, Transkaryotic Therapies (TKT) and Shire. Medison Biotech has invested approximately $1.5 million in the company to date.
The company’s scientific founder is Professor Nadav Zamir, formerly of Tel Aviv University, who had been developing a library of infochemicals as a source of potential new drugs before founding Alydar. Zamir now serves as Chief Scientific Officer at the company, which has its R&D facilities in Petach Tikva. New compounds for Alydar’s library are obtained from Zamir’s work, as well as through exclusive collaborations with scientific advisors who have synthesized infochemicals.
According to Sherman-Gold, an important advantage of infochemicals is that they work on signal transduction pathways, which by their very nature include the type of chemical-receptor interactions that drug developers seek in identifying therapeutic compounds. "Signal transduction mechanisms are highly conserved throughout nature, so compounds which are found in a butterfly may also have biological activity in humans, increasing the potential number of bioactive compounds that may be therapeutic," Sherman-Gold said.
The company has chosen to target cardiovascular and nervous system disorders, as well as cancer, because "the mechanisms of infochemicals are relevant in these systems," Sherman-Gold said.
Sherman-Gold joined the Alydar Board of Directors in 2000 at the request of Medison Biotech’s CEO Meir Jakobsohn. She became CEO of the company this spring. "I was not actively seeking a CEO position," she said. "However, the opportunity presented itself when Meir Jakobsohn asked me to take the position. I believed in the idea of the company. I was excited about it, and I had known the people for some time, so I agreed to accept the role of Alydar’s CEO."
Prior to moving to Alydar, Sherman-Gold held a senior business development position at Abgenix, where she put together a number of deals with pharmaceutical giants including Pfizer and others. She holds a PhD in life sciences from the Weizmann Institute, completed her postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University, and holds an MBA from California State University, San Jose.
Alydar is currently seeking between five to ten million dollars to fund development including the continued testing of compounds in various disease models and pre-clinical development. The money is also needed for the establishment of collaborations with companies and academic institutions.
"We’re a very small company, yet we’re truly global," Sherman-Gold said of Alydar, which has a total of six employees, three of which are in the US, and three in Israel. "Currently, we’re doing our R&D work in Israel and in the U.S., but we will do research where it makes sense - geography does not limit our operations. The Medison Group wanted the company to be operated from the United States, specifically from the San Francisco Bay Area, where the life sciences industry is strong and there is access to personnel, collaborations and consultants," she said.
www.BioIsrael.com
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