Spinout UBC aims to cross the blood-brain barrier to improve protein delivery to the brain.
Vancouver CereCura Nanotherapy wants to use the same technology used in COVID-19 vaccines to treat neurological disorders such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.
Based out of the University of British Columbia (UBC), the preclinical biotech startup says it has already demonstrated the ability to efficiently deliver multiple proteins into the brains of rodents, a step toward treating brain diseases. This is a long-standing problem due to the restrictive blood-brain barrier (BBB).
Now, armed with C$1.4 million in seed funding, CereCura plans to test the therapeutic efficacy of its lead drug candidate in rodents before proving it can deliver the same proteins to the brains of larger animals.
“We see this as something that will change the way many diseases are treated.”
CereCura co-founder and CEO Louis-Philippe Bernier is a strong believer in lipid ribonucleic acid nanoparticles (LDL-RNA) as a means of delivering new therapeutics to the human body. “We see this as something that will change the way we treat many diseases, not just the brain,” the BetaKit neuroscientist said in an exclusive interview.
CereCura's seed round, which closed in September, was led by Vancouver-based WUTIF Capital with support from eFund, UBC Venture Funds, undisclosed angels and existing backer HexTwo Capital. This brings the startup's total funding to $2.2 million, a figure that includes $800,000 in pre-seed funding through the end of 2023. To date, CereCura has supplemented that amount with just over $4 million in government grants.
CereCura was founded by renowned scientist and UBC professor Peter Callis. who developed LDLdrug delivery system that has enabled the creation of messenger RNA (mRNA) COVID-19 vaccines produced by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech. LNPs act as a protective capsule that protects fragile RNAs and mRNAs while they deliver genetic instructions to the body.
After receiving his PhD in neurobiology from McGill University, Bernier spent the first part of his career at UBC studying various brain diseases and their causes.
“Academic research is fun,” Bernier said. “We're making a lot of discoveries, a lot of new things, but it may not always have a clear impact. We're always studying what's going on in the brain, but it's hard to fix.”
After meeting LNP pioneer Callis Bernier and his colleagues began adapting the new “core” LNP-RNA technology to the brain. “Everything worked very well and very quickly, and we realized that this project had commercial potential,” he said.
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Bernier described the company's approach as a “pivot on [LNP] “MRNA Technologies to Improve Protein Delivery to the Brain.”
While there is a lot of knowledge about which proteins cause brain disease, Bernier said getting proteins into the brain has been a long-standing problem, given the BBB, which tightly regulates the entry of new substances.
The CEO noted that this is good in many ways because it protects the brain from pathogens, but added that it also prevents many drugs from entering the brain and represents one of the key challenges in treating brain diseases.
LNPs offer a way to deliver “an mRNA pattern that encodes a protein that we think will be therapeutic” to the brain so that it can make these proteins internally, bypassing the BBB.
CereCura's lead program is focused on neuropathic Gaucher disease, a rare disease that Bernier says can be chronic or even fatal and is caused by a deficiency of a single enzyme: glucocerebrosidase. The startup is also focusing part of its efforts on developing treatments for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases. While Bernier said they are caused by a variety of factors, he noted that there are many proteins that have been proven to be effective.
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Bernier noted that enzyme replacement therapy—a process that involves making a missing enzyme or protein in the laboratory and introducing it into the body through intravenous therapy—has been around for decades, but its effectiveness in the brain is limited.
The CEO said CereCura's “Trojan horse” approach, which uses LNPs, has a “much longer half-life” of a week, compared to direct injections, which last only a few hours.
“We decided to invest in CereCura because we were incredibly impressed with the team, their accomplishments and their vision for the future,” WUTIF Capital COO Aaron Stewart told BetaKit. “We are proud to support such a noble mission and see tremendous growth potential.”
Stewart believes Callis has the necessary experience to help guide CereCura on its long path to commercialization.
CereCura's goal is to build a portfolio of multiple preclinically proven drugs, and Bernier believes the startup's technology is versatile enough to facilitate that task relatively quickly.
Image courtesy of CereCura Nanotherapeutics.
