Poland’s Selvita Opens New Bioinformatics Company and Opens Offices in Cambridge and Bay Area
September 24, 2015
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
Selvita, headquartered in Krakow, Poland, announced today that it created a subsidiary, Ardigen, which will focus on bioinformatics.
Selvita is the largest drug discovery company in Central and Eastern Europe, with offices in Cambridge, Mass., San Bruno, Calif., and Cambridge, U.K. Founded in 2007, it currently employs 275.
Ardigen will be run by Janusz Homa, co-founder and former chief executive officer of Software Mind. He is also the former vice president of Comarch Telecom, and co-founder of BillBird, the first Poland alternative payment network. Sebastian Kwasny, Selvita’s director of Bioinformatics, as well as a member of the company’s Management Board, will act as vice president of operations at Ardigen.
“Advanced IT technologies are essential to achieve the promise of personalized medicine,” said Homa in a statement. “This is what allows us to reach the knowledge contained in the petabytes of information gathered in various research institutes, clinics and by contributed patients. The marriage of the scientific potential and drug discovery experience of Selvita, with the possibilities offered by the modern IT technologies in the hands of our top-class informaticians and software developers, opens up a huge, completely new area of technology solutions supporting the most difficult battle any human being will ever face, the battle for health.”
The new company will focus on three strategic business units. Bioinformatics services that have been performed by Selvita will be expanded utilizing Big Data integration, analysis, and custom application development. The other two areas will be related to biological and clinical data analysis in genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics and immunomics. The final will be related to personalized medicine.
The company announced on Sept. 22 that it and Cambridge, Mass.-based H3 Biomedicine Inc. , would extend their strategic collaboration in precision cancer drugs for another year. They hope to make more progress toward filing an IND during 2016.
“We are pleased to announce the extension of our collaboration with Selvita,” said Markus Warmuth, president and chief executive officer of H3 in a statement. “Together we have continued to validate targets within a specific genomic context, which is at the core of H3’s vision and mission. The strength of the combined teams has allowed for rapid advancement of the biology and chemistry in parallel. We look forward to further advancing the programs from discovery to translation over the next year.”
Only last week Selvita announced that it had established its first U.S.-based offices, opening a fully-owned U.S. subsidiary, Selvita Inc.
“Massachusetts’ thriving life sciences community has become a magnet for investment by international companies that want to be where the action is,” said State Governor Charlie Baker in a statement. “We welcome Selvita to Cambridge, and look forward to partnering with them to create jobs, and further economic growth and development.”
“The U.S. drug discovery market is already the largest for Selvita and absolutely strategic for the future development of the company,” said Pawel Przewiezlikowski, chief executive officer of Selvita in a statement. “Both the Greater Boston Area and San Francisco Bay Area are key to the whole biotechnology industry. Our presence in the U.S. will not only bring us closer both to our current and potential U.S. clients, but at the same time will facilitate the bidirectional transfer of know-how between our labs in Poland and the partner base in the U.S.”
Will the Presidential Election Change the Face of the Way Prescription Drugs are Sold in the United States?
Although Turing Pharmaceuticals announced it will revise its 5,000 percent increase of a newly acquired drug to treat toxoplasmosis, the move sparked a public outcry that resulted in one presidential candidate calling for price caps on prescription medication.
In August, Turing Pharmaceuticals acquired toxoplasmosis drug Daraprim from Impax Laboratories and increased the price of the medication from $13.50 per tablet to $750 per tablet, a 5,000 percent increase. Turing Chief Executive Officer Martin Shkreli defended the increase, saying the revenues would be used to subsidize new research into treatments for toxoplasmosis. Has since said the company will reduce the price, but did not specify what the price would be.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said if elected she would cap monthly out-of-pocket costs for prescription drugs at $250 to avoid “price gouging.” Her comment sent the stock market into a state of flux, with several large companies seeing a drop in their stock of up to 10 percent. The Nasdaq Biotechnology Index dropped 4.4 percent and the SPDR S&P Biotech ETF dropped by 6 percent.
BioSpace wants to know what you think: Will the presidential election change the face of the way prescription drugs are sold in the United States?