![]() ![]() So far, the company has raised $34 million as investors, including Versant Ventures, MPM Capital and Astellas Venture Management, have doubled down on their initial $19 million commitment to the new drug developer. We’re making the lock that can work with these keys,” says Narachi. ![]() “What we’ve done is flipped the whole paradigm on its head. The company then draws from a portfolio of receptor small-molecule drug pairs that were developed and tested for their pharmacological and toxicological effects, but discarded because of a lack of efficacy, to create new therapies with receptors tailored to respond to those drugs. “Most of these receptors are naturally opened or closed by acetylcholine… We’ve engineered these receptors so that they’re no longer responsive to acetylcholine, but they are responsive to a man-made drug.” We’ve engineered it so that it is no longer responsive,” says Michael Narachi, the president and chief executive officer at Coda. The idea behind chemogenetics is to engineer a receptor that when you put it in with a… gene therapy… it does nothing. Those receptors can be unlocked by small-molecule drugs, which would instruct the sensory neurons to stop firing, thereby cutting off the signals of pain to the brain.Ĭoda’s virus on a neural cell (Image courtesy of Coda Biotherapeutics) ![]() Other approaches like electrical nerve stimulation can carry risks, and invasive surgeries are an unappealing last resort, according to Coda’s chief executive.Ĭoda’s experimental treatment is based on a science called chemogenetics, which uses a harmless virus to create new receptors in the sensory neurons that provide signals to the brain about physical stimuli. “The incentives were there for people to prescribe more and more, particularly when they had already been convinced it was the right thing to do - the compassionate thing to do,” Keith Humphreys, a psychiatrist at Stanford University and a former White House drug-policy adviser, told the journal Nature.Īs the pain epidemic and attendant opioid crisis began to skyrocket, several companies have been racing to find alternatives to the drug treatments that were now killing Americans by the thousands. Of those deaths, about 60% involved synthetic opioids. In 2017, 47,600 Americans died from opioid-involved overdoses, according to the Centers for Disease Control. And over the past 20 years the doctors treating those Americans and the drug companies developing therapies for them have managed to turn their treatment into a new epidemic - opioid addiction. There are more than 19 million Americans who live with chronic neuropathic pain, according to Coda’s own statistics. Nicholas Boulis, the founder of Emory’s Gene and Cell Therapy for Neurorestoration Laboratory, Coda uses gene therapies to treat neurological diseases starting with severe pain and epilepsy.Īmerica is a country in pain. The receptor is designed to be quiescent in the transduced cells but will specifically and dose-dependently inhibit neurons when exposed to a novel, orally bioavailable small-molecule agonist.Ĭoda expects this treatment will produce substantially improved and durable results while potentially avoiding off-target/adverse effects of currently available treatments.If the researchers, executives and investors behind Coda Biotherapeutics have their way, one day soon there really could be a cure for pain.Ĭo-founded by researchers Joseph Glorioso, from the University of Pittsburgh’s microbiology and molecular genetics department, and Dr. The company’s treatment aims to modulate specific neuronal circuits via adeno-associated virus (AAV)-mediated delivery of an engineered, inhibitory receptor by standard-of-care neurosurgical procedures. Led by Michael Narachi, president and CEO, Coda is a preclinical-stage biopharmaceutical company that leverages a gene therapy approach to deploy a chemogenetic strategy for treating neurological disorders. The company intends to use the funds to expand operations and its business reach. As part of the financing, David Stack, chairman and CEO of Pacira Biosciences, has joined CODA’s board of directors. with participation from MPM Capital, Versant Ventures and Silicon Valley Bank (SVB). The round was led by Pacira BioSciences, Inc. Coda Biotherapeutics, a San Francisco CA-based preclinical-stage biopharmaceutical company, raised $28M in funding. ![]()
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