Alacris Pharmaceuticals has a set of state-of-the-art unique and proprietary technologies that allow for the rapid and cost-effective retrieval of biological "state" data from biological material such as clinical samples, including comprehensive state information from the samples’ nucleic and ribonucleic acid content and targeted state information from the samples’ protein and regulatory element content. In addition the company has an exclusive commercial use license to a patented biological network modeling system developed by one of the company’s scientific founders, Prof. Lehrach.
Low-cost sequencing and genotyping
The company’s sequencing and genotyping technology was developed at Harvard Medical School in the laboratory of Dr. George Church, who is also one of the company’s three scientific founders. This technology is currently 10x more cost effective than any commercially available sequencing technology and it is anticipated that this cost will be reduced another 5x in the next few months.
Although this sequencing and genotyping technology is not proprietary to
Alacris Pharmaceuticals, practically speaking, the general public is more
than twelve months behind deployment at Alacris Pharmaceuticals. As this
preferential access will occur for every technology release cycle the
company will continue to enjoy a significant cost advantage over its
competitors until the maximum cost reduction of this technology is attained.
The life cycle of this technology is estimated to be five years.
Therapeutic mechanism of action
The company will be incubated by the Max Planck Institute in Berlin giving the early entity cost effective access to state-of-the-art technology for translational medicine with access the latest equipment, procedures and reagents for large scale genomics, proteomics, and expression experiments. Because the company’s business aims are well aligned with the research aims of two of the three scientific founders, Prof. Dr. Hans Lehrach and Prof. Dr. Bernhard Herrmann both of whom are Directors at the MPI in Berlin there will be a very strong parallel track of academic research carried out at the MPI in Berlin that will be synergistic with the commercial development of the companies translational medicine platform. The company’s access to equipment and to synergistic research at the MPI coupled with the deep pharmaceutical experience of the six pharmaceutical executives who are the working founders and/or key employees of the company ensure that the entities’ capabilities in translational medicine and its capabilities to define therapeutic mechanisms of action will remain at minimum state-of-the-art.
Modeling the effect of patient specific genetic variations to drug response
The company’s systems biology/modeling technology is a revolutionary system that was developed at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin in the laboratory of Prof. Dr. Hans Lehrach. This system is the only system in the world with the capability to model all the key pathways involved in cancer and simultaneously model the complex interactions between these pathways. Modeling such a large interconnected network is crucial to accurately model patient drug response and the systems ability to do so is based on a novel method for handling the uncertainty posed by the unknown kinetic constants of such a large system. The novel methods used in the system were developed and patented by one of the scientific founders, Prof. Dr. Hans Lehrach and the company has an exclusive commercial license to this patented technology. Additionally methods have been developed for rapidly "personalizing" the system to an individual patient by applying the patients’ genotypic variations directly to the elements of the system.
