Strategy

During the past two decades the prevailing drug development paradigm has been to "rationally design" synthetic small-molecule candidate drugs with maximal selectivity against one target for one particular disease. Concurrent with this paradigm shift, there has been a noticeable decrease in the number of new drug approvals and as a consequence a lack of new effective treatments for diseases with high unmet medical needs.

As an alternative drug development strategy Axcentua develops drugs by "crystal re-engineering" of natural compounds to arrive at novel proprietary drugs faster, with less risk and at a fraction of the cost spent by developing synthetic small-molecules by rational design.

Natural compounds have a proven track-record as drugs and represents a largely untapped resource of new potential drugs. However, natural compounds do often have unfavorable drug-like properties and in addition do not readily lend themselves to intellectual property protection, making their use as candidate drugs difficult. To overcome these limitations and to be able to exploit natural compounds as drug candidates, Axcentua is pioneering “crystal re-engineering” as a strategy to develop new innovative drugs from natural compounds with documented pharmacological effects. Using crystal re-engineering, new crystalline (solid) forms of natural compounds are identified by a comprehensive screen followed by a selection and further development of those specific crystalline forms that have the most beneficial drug-like properties needed for the development of orally taken drugs.

Using this strategy, Axcentua has developed the lead compound AXP107-11, a multi-targeted compound for treatment of cancer. Other compounds are under development using the same strategy of crystal re-engineering pioneered by Axcentua.