Call it a stroke of insight.
Before she founded QR Pharma in 2008, Maria Maccecchini led Symphony Pharmaceuticals/Annovis, which discovered how to protect nerve cells from dying as a result of stroke or traumatic brain injury.
Now QR, her Berwyn-based, specialty pharmaceutical company, is developing novel treatments for Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and other neurodegenerative disorders and has helped determine that cells die the same way from such chronic diseases as they do from stroke or injury.
The discovery opens a possible new application for QR, which has two compounds in clinical development: Posiphen targets early stage Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and may stop or slow the progression of the disease; BNC is expected to work in later stage Alzheimer's. QR is now studying whether its compounds could similarly treat damage from stroke or injury.
Maccecchini says that QR's early results are promising. “We can actually treat animals and get full recovery from learning problems, memory problems, mental deficiency problems,” she says. “We can fully – and I really mean fully – recover these Alzheimer's animals and these Parkinson's animals.”
QR recently received a $140,000 investment from Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Southeastern Pennsylvania, in addition to an earlier infusion of $610,000.
Now Maccecchini is seeking $21 million to get to phase two clinical trials and hopes for a deep-pocketed corporate partnership to pave the way to the ultimate goal of approval and commercial launch. That is still four to five years and a few hundred million dollars away, she notes.
She's been down this road before: Symphony, which she founded in the early 1990s, was acquired by Transgenomic, a global biotech, in 2001.
Source: Maria Maccecchini, QR Pharma
Writer: Elise Vider