Lipid imbalances does not only cause common diseases such as diabetes and cardiovascular diseases but also various rare diseases. The pharma company Lipigon is specialised in diseases caused by lipid imbalances, with an initial focus on rare diseases that lack adequate treatments.

 

New candidate for treatment of severe disease

The company’s main program Lipisense targets the genetic disease HoFH. The disease is serious and associated with a high risk of cardiovascular diseases at an early age unless it is treated. Many of today’s drugs use a receptor (the LDL receptor) that is defect in persons with HoFH and consequently the treatment results are often insufficient. Drugs that do not use the LDL receptor are often associated with severe side effects such as fatty liver disease.

Lipisense is based on a mechanism that is neither dependent on the LDL receptor nor expected to cause severe side effects.

“The fact that we can make a huge difference for our target group is a large motivation for us. It is not unusual that people with HoFh needs plasma apheresis, similar to dialysis, twice a week up to six hours per time as a consequence of insufficient effect with today’s drugs. These persons often suffer from a significantly reduced quality of life”, says Stefan Nilsson, CEO and co-founder of Lipigon.

 

Status as orphan drug reduces time to market

Lipigon’s drug candidate has shown promising results in animal models and initial toxicity studies have been performed without any remarks. The company will now optimise the candidate for pre-clinical safety and toxicity development to start clinical trials phase 1 in the beginning of 2020. The development of Lipisense is based on more than 50 years of research in lipid biology and is managed by researchers at Umeå University in collaboration with the German pharma company Secarna.

”Our strategy is to work with partners to shorten our time to market and we plan to develop Lipisense until it reaches the market. The candidate’s status as an orphan drug reduces our application fees and allow us to access various forms of support in the market approval process, reducing our time to market. We will also benefit from more generous patent terms whereas the market is still significant. According to our estimates, the total market for HoFH drugs is approximately 1,500 million dollar per year and we expect that Lipisense will reach one third of the market”, says Stefan.

 

Potential to reach billion dollar market

In the long term, the company plans to broaden their indications within their area of expertise – blood lipids. “Our third drug development program targets people with lipid imbalance, dyslipidemia, that remain after treatment with conventional drugs such as statins. The market for dyslipidemia is larger than 9 billion euro only in Europe, the US and Japan”, says Stefan.

 

Now you have the opportunity to join Lipigon’s development

Learn more about the company or to receive complete information about the company.

About Sciety

Sciety is an investment syndicate that wants innovations that make a difference to reach their full potential and create value. We select unlisted growth companies in the life science sector and prepare them for investments from our membership network. Learn more about Sciety.