Objective
India currently imports almost 80% of all its Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients used to formulate drugs. The cost of manufacturing these ingredients indigenously is, in a lot of cases, either the same or lesser than the cost of importing them. Setting up plants to manufacture these ingredients locally will be a shot in the arm for India’s economy, boosting the Make In India initiative and reducing unnecessary imports.
Keeping this in mind, we at Oxyease intend to set up our own plant to manufacture Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients to help with our research on new molecules development as well as with the manufacture of critical drugs.
To complement this initiative, we are also setting up a state-of-the-art research and development center at Mysore where our core focus areas will be the application of Nanotechnology to cure cancer and treatment of house dust mite allergies.
Focus Areas
Effective Detection of House Dust Mite (HDM) related allergies and treatment:
Recent surveys indicate there are close to around 300 million asthmatics worldwide, and that 80% of all asthma related deaths happen in low to middle income communities. While developed nations now use recombinant allergen-based advanced diagnostic tools like ImmunoCap and Allergen Microarray, we in India still depend on the age-old skin prick test using crude allergen extracts. This lack of modern diagnostic practices often leads to ineffective treatment of allergies, increasing the cost of treatment and compromising the quality of life an individual with these ailments leads. For example, the United Kingdom has technologically advanced diagnostic tools like FastCheckPOC®20 and Allersys®. India currently neither has access to high quality allergen extracts, nor are there initiatives being taken to address the quality of diagnostic reagents due to the taxation laws and legal documentation involved in the processing of company licensing.
The Oxyease R&D team proposes to develop rapid HDM allergen specific immunoglobulin detection for allergic asthmatics, followed by a semi-quantitative estimation of the presence of indoor HDM allergens and formulation of medication for sublingual immunotherapy based on clinical trials.
Development of Targeted Nano Formulations with Potential Pharmacological Agent:
Triple negative breast cancer is one of the most difficult cancers to treat among the different types of breast cancers and contributes to almost 20% of all breast cancer cases. Currently, no potential therapeutic targets or target combinations have been identified to treat this breast cancer type. Even the existing pharmacological agents inhibiting the identified molecular pathways such as Wnt/β-catenin, NOTCH and Hedgehog, which are involved in the pathogenesis and progression of TNBCs, are still limited to preclinical studies or in early clinical trials. Recent reviews by Hwang, SY., etc., have mentioned that conventional chemotherapy and radiation are the only primary systemic therapeutic strategies currently available, and no other FDA-approved targeted therapies are available to treat TNBCs.
The aggressive nature of TNBCs and poor prognosis have been leading to high rates of proliferation and metastatic behavior. Due to these aggressive features and lack of targeted therapies, numerous attempts are being made by experts to:
- Discover viable molecular targets
- Develop potent directed-therapeutic agents for TNBCs.
Therefore, developing a potent formulation that can directly act on tumors (tumor-directed therapeutic strategy) is a viable approach. With this goal in mind and the fact that breast cancer tumors not only contain tumor cells but also M2 type macrophages (up to 70% of tumor), the Oxyease R&D team has conceptualized novel nano-formulation to selectively target breast cancer tumors. The preliminary tests carried out in our laboratory (using cell lines as well as patient tumors) have demonstrated the predominant expression of a protein called as “Leg” in tumor associated macrophages (TAMs) as well as tumor cells. Studies (from our laboratory as well as from other groups) inhibiting this protein’s activity using pharmacological agents have shown a marked reduction of cancer cells proliferation and induction of apoptosis. Therefore, “Leg” could be a potential breast cancer recognition marker as well as therapeutic target.
Discovery of small molecules that targets novel drug-targets of human breast, ovary, and prostate cancer models
Despite the broad synthetic opportunities that organic chemistry provides, only about 5% of known scaffolds currently are used in modern pharmaceuticals. In the design of lead compounds, the area of focus remains privileged scaffolds – fragments presented in natural products and classical pharmaceuticals. Therefore, the biology of organic compounds still remains poorly investigated.
The Oxyease R&D team proposes to investigate the use of lead molecules and other bioactive peptides and peptide-based metal complexes that are generated from our universities in drug formulation. The concept is based computational biology via high-throughput virtual screening of molecules against drug targets of cancer.