Meet Secarna: The leading independent European antisense drug discovery company
Secarna Pharmaceuticals is addressing a variety of targets that are either considered to be undruggable by conventional approaches or for which third generation antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs) offer a considerable advantage . Founded in 2015, Secarna’s mission is to leverage their proprietary ASO platform, LNAplus™, to bring novel, highly specific, safe and efficacious ASO therapies to patients in need.
Antisense therapeutics to broaden the scope of druggable targets
Antisense oligonucleotides are short synthetic single strands of DNA or RNA that are designed to specifically bind to their target RNA thereby altering or preventing its expression. Due to their unique mechanism of action, ASOs offer new avenues to address a host of targets that were deemed undruggable by current therapies. They are a promising approach to target factors involved in disease initiation and progression. In recent times, oligonucleotide therapeutics have grown at a faster rate than gene therapies, suggesting the class is now taking its well-deserved share of the spotlight. Secarna offers a compelling approach to antisense drug discovery and development. With it’s third generation ASO platform, Secarna is it the leading independent player in Europe.
LNAplus™ platform for the rapid development of the third generation ASO therapeutics
LNAplus™ is Secarna’s proprietary third generation ASO platform that encompasses all aspects of drug discovery and pre-clinical development. The platform includes the powerful proprietary Oligofyer™ bioinformatics and LNA Vit(r)ox™ screening system, best-in-class high throughput screening and target-specific functional assays. A key advantage of the LNAplus™ platform is rapid candidate generation with lead compound identification within only 24 weeks. This translates into a streamlined process to achieve clinical candidate development.
Rich and multifaceted pipeline holds attractive licensing opportunities for pharma partners
Secarna’s ASOs have been validated by in-house projects as well as in several successful active partnerships including large programs with Evotec and Denali. Another example showing Secarna’s success, is the Company’s collaboration with Lipigon, that resulted in advancing the first ASO derived from the LNAplus™ platform into the clinic in 2022.
Secarna also maintains a focused in-house pipeline with advanced pre-clinical stage products in the fields of immune-oncology and inflammatory/fibrotic diseases. These promising in-house development projects generate attractive licensing opportunities for global and regional pharma partners.
In summary, the Company strives to become the partner-of-choice for ASO drug discovery and development programs and to form strategic partnerships fully leveraging its collaborators’ as well as the Company’s own strengths.
Two typical structures are found in Secarna’s partnership portfolio:
In-house discovery & development: Progress of high value programs to the next value inflection point, followed by flexible partnering opportunities for further development and commercialization.
Discovery & Research Alliances: Combination of Secarna’s know-how with its partners’ therapeutic expertise to allow rapid generation of high-quality ASO pipelines.
To learn more about the advantages of working with Secarna and the competitive edge of the LNAplus™ platform, visit Secarna’s website or get in touch: info@secarna.com.
