Dr. Thomas Scholl, founder and CEO of ChemoCentryx, discusses the company's oral drug candidate for Crohn's disease, which showed high remission rates in a Phase 2 trial of 435 patients and is now moving to Phase 3 with GSK. The company is also developing treatments for arthritis, diabetes, and other autoimmune diseases.
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Hi, this is Bei Bei Song, host of SCNova Life Science TV. I'm in San Francisco at the 28th JP Morgan Healthcare Conference speaking with Dr. Thomas Scholl, the founder and CEO of ChemoCentrics, a private therapeutics company targeting the chemokine receptors for inflammatory diseases. Hi, Dr. Scholl.
Hi, Bei Bei. Great to be here.
So tell us, what are chemokines and what is the mechanism of your drugs?
Chemokines are very important proteins in the body that control the way different immune cells get to different organs and different tissues. And it's sort of like a trafficking control system for the body's immune system. And part of that immune system are the army of cells called inflammatory cells. So many chemokines act as signposts to get different inflammatory cells into different organs. And that can be a problem during immune diseases and inflammatory diseases where those cells go to your tissues and organs inappropriately and do damage. Your body makes many different kinds of chemokines, about 50 or so different kinds of chemokines, but many of those chemokines are made in just a given tissue system. So, for example, in your gastrointestinal tract, which is in contact with the outside world all the time, there's a certain specialized chemokine known as T-E-C-K, or TEC. It's only made in the gut in adults, and that attracts immune cells by being expressed in the gastrointestinal tract, or the gut, and then as immune cells float around the body in circulation and see that signal in the GI tract, if those immune cells have a receptor for TEC, they'll stop circulating, and they will migrate into the tissue in the gut and look for trouble, basically.
Okay, so what are the specific diseases that these components can treat?
You mentioned gastrointestinal diseases. Yes, precisely. So there are some very important diseases of the gastrointestinal tract. As one example, inflammatory bowel disease, either could be Crohn's disease or colitis. These are very important diseases, and by inhibiting the chemokine receptor that respond to that chemokine that is made in the gut, we can stop the inflammatory cells from accumulating in the gut and sort of arrest their ability to do damage over time and treat the disease of inflammatory bowel disease, Crohn's and colitis, in that way. And then in other diseases like diabetes, multiple sclerosis, psoriasis, arthritis, there are other chemokine receptors that we're blocking to block the action of the chemokines in those specific tissue places in the body.
What is the status of your What are your products? Are you developing for all of these?
Yes, in fact, our products include a drug, a novel drug for inflammatory bowel disease, a novel drug for arthritis, a novel drug for diabetes, and some earlier-stage products that will treat a spectrum of other autoimmune diseases as well.
What's your most promising?
Right now, they're all quite promising, but our most advanced drug is the drug that we've tested extensively in Crohn's disease. This drug just finished a very large worldwide trial of 435 Crohn's patients in 17 countries all around the world, and that trial was successful. We were able to put people into a clinically responsive state within about 3 months on the drug, and then over the course of a year, we could have people in remission at a very high rate. And the drug is very simple to take. It's an oral drug. And quite safe to date. So that's now going to go into full late-stage Phase 3 testing.
And are you developing yourself, or are you partnering with any other company?
Up until this point, that particular drug has been independently developed by ChemoCentrics, and we have an alliance with GlaxoSmithKline, the large British-American pharmaceutical firm. And after seeing the recent data, they had a right to take an option, or an option to take a license on that drug. And they've exercised that option as of this week. So going forward, we'll be working very closely with GSK to develop that drug in Crohn's and other IBD diseases.
Good for you. So looking forward at this year, what are your objectives on the product and financial end?
Well, clearly we want— we're very, very motivated to bring that drug as quickly as possible into clinical practice. So working with GSK, we'll make sure it goes through its Phase 3 trials as efficiently as we can. In other drugs that we're developing, we have a goal to complete a Phase 2 trial in diabetes with another compound that's not partnered yet with anybody, and also to bring in at least 2 more compounds into clinical trials from our discovery platform, one in cancer and one in another aspect of inflammatory disease. So we've got quite a lot on our plate this year, and we hope to just push the clinical pipeline forward as efficiently as possible.
From your presentation yesterday, sounds like you're fairly okay with your cash position, your money position.
We're extremely fortunate in that way. We have a very nice cash position right now. Some of our colleagues in the field measure their ability to develop their programs in terms of months, but we have multiple years of budget right now and cash in the bank. How did you get so lucky when many other private companies are struggling to get funding? I think we've been very fortunate in that a number of our programs have worked very nicely scientifically and medically. We've been fortunate in fundraising in an environment which has not been otherwise very reasonable for fundraising, but we've had some success there. And the alliance with Glaxo has also been a very important part of the budget for us as well. So all of those have worked together favorably. And we're very conservative about expenditures in our company because we realize that it's always difficult to raise money in biotech.
