ReceptorPharma moves in to SmiLe Incubator

The newly formed company ReceptorPharma has moved into SmiLe’s incubator and plans to develop drugs to treat Alzheimer’s disease. The company will use newly discovered mechanisms in cells that could stop and potentially reverse the course of disease, and much of the work will be carried out in SmiLe’s laboratories.

People in the developed world are living longer than ever, and today almost every other person in the US over the age of 85 suffers from Alzheimer’s, according to the recent annual report published by the Alzheimer's Association. In Alzheimer’s disease the nerve cells in the brain atrophy, especially in the regions where the memory is placed, and there is no cure for the disease at this time. Around one percent of the entire global gross domestic product for 2010 was spent treating Alzheimer's patients, according to the 2010 World Alzheimer's Report.

“There hasn’t been a new medicine to treat Alzheimer's disease for almost 20 years, and today’s drugs can only partially slow disease progression; they don’t stop it, or restore functions that patients have lost,” says Stefan Broselid, one the company’s founders.

ReceptorPharma will develop a drug candidate that will be able to stop and perhaps even reverse the disease through a newly discovered and unused signaling mechanism in the cells of the body. The company will use SmiLe’s laboratories and instruments for its drug development, as well as its business development support to build the company. In its first project, the company will focus on three receptors that they will develop and use to screen new substances, with the hope of developing drug candidates to treat Alzheimer’s, which by extension may also be able to treat Parkinson’s and various types of cancer, since the same mechanisms can probably also affect these diseases.

Stefan Broselid is a researcher who earned his PhD in molecular pharmacology in 2015 in the field of G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) at Lund University, after which he was a post-doctoral researcher at Boston University.

“We’re focusing our drug candidate on some of the cell’s GPCRs. Of all the different groups of receptors in the body, GPCRs are the most common, involved in both ordinary physiology and in countless diseases, and they are already drug targets in an estimated 35 percent of all modern drugs. Nevertheless, they are essentially untried as therapeutic targets for Alzheimer’s disease, largely because their links to the disease were only recently discovered,” says Stefan Broselid.

The company was founded at the end of last year and its cofounders, in addition to Stefan Broselid who is responsible for the cell and molecular biology portion of the project, are businessman Zacharia Ressaissi, CEO of the company, and Erik Ekengard, who holds a PhD in synthetic chemistry and will work on designing the company’s drug candidates.

For information about Receptor Pharma, contact: Zacharia Ressaissi, vd för ReceptorPharma
+46 (0)73 530 85 55, zacharia@receptorpharma.com