Orion Corporation has come together with selected university research groups and companies to develop better personalised treatments using a New Modalities Ecosystem.
Funded by Business Finland, the creation of novel medicines and better personalised treatments for the future in an ecosystem is well underway. The new ecosystem is a unique multidiscipline collaboration combining high level academic knowledge with drug discovery and development.
The New Modalities Ecosystem to provide better personalised treatments
Orion intends to provide improved personalized treatments for patients and build upon new competences in addition to the strong know-how in small-molecular drug development. To improve upon cell and gene therapy is the main goal, whereby, monogenic rare disease may provide a more straight forward and rational way of identifying suitable drug target proteins and disease mechanisms as well as implementation of new treatment technologies.
The New Modalities Ecosystem has the aim to enable an improved understanding of disease pathology related to the symptoms and disease progression and develop better treatments by applying large molecular drugs and diagnostic tools as well as digital wearable patient tools for disease symptom recording.
There is also a great need to identify patient subpopulations with a disease and better understanding of the disease symptoms as well as continuous monitoring of the symptoms (digital 24/7 monitoring technologies). The identified treatment target proteins and developed technologies may be applicable also in more common diseases. We will initially focus on rare diseases which are part of the Finnish disease heritage, where excellent genetic and clinical research as well as collaboration networks have been established in Finland.
A collaboration of high-level academic research with industrial drug research
This Ecosystem uniquely combines high-level academic research with industrial drug research and development. In addition to Orion Corporation, the Ecosystem participants include University of Turku, University of Helsinki, University of Eastern Finland, Folkhälsan, Finland, as well as the companies PerkinElmer, Syrinx Bioanalytics, AdmeScope, Petsofi, Forendo Pharma and InMe.
Orion extends its biopharmaceutical capabilities towards biologics (therapeutic proteins) and simultaneously starts evaluating other advanced treatment modalities in a systematic manner.
The scientists participating in the better disease understanding part of the Ecosystem are internationally acknowledged scientists in medical research and their disease mechanistic work has created significant new knowledge in inherited diseases involving neuronal and muscle degeneration.
The team at the University of Turku aim at finding new ways for chemical modifications of antibodies to apply them as carriers for the tissue and cell-specific delivery of drugs, primarily of RNA-based therapeutics. Along with expanding the established recombinant antibody library technology to serve as a lead factory for therapeutics development.
Syrinx Bioanalytics aims to develop novel analytical methods for next generation oligonucleotides to be utilized for pharmacokinetic, immunogenicity and biological activity studies during drug development.
Admescope develops novel ligand binding assay, drug-drug interaction models and analytical methodology for therapeutic large molecules.
Inme collaborates with the University of Turku (Department of Biotechnology) in order to achieve new-generation high-sensitivity immunoassay for hormonal analyses and Forendo Pharma supports the ecosystem with its expertise.
The established New Modalities Ecosystems creates novel capabilities and expertise that can be expanded and utilized more broadly beyond the ecosystem providing competitive edge also for other companies in developing their business models and supporting their growth.
