Rhenovia Pharma opens first US office

Rhenovia Pharma SAS, a biotechnology company specializing in biosimulation applied to the discovery of new medications to treat brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s, today announces its first international subsidiary, Rhenovia Inc, incorporated in Delaware.

Rhenovia’s new operation will be based in the Greater Boston Area with offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Rhenovia Inc. will enable the widespread use of its unique biosimulation technology in healthcare, with particular focus on accelerating the search for new treatments of diseases of the central and peripheral nervous system. It will do this via its service partnership offers in the form of studies using proprietary tools such as High Throughput Search for Synergistic Drug Combinations, Numerical Pharmacological Compound Profiling, anticipation of Safety/Toxicity and Drug-Drug Interaction Risks, and alliances for the implementation of Rhenovia’s biosimulation approach in the Drug Discovery and Development Programs.

Rhenovia will also be looking to expand its emerging drug candidate pipeline as well as offering attractive investment opportunities. ”It’s the right time to intensify our commercial activity and to move closer to our major pharma and biotech clients, and academic research partners,” said Dr. Serge Bischoff, president and CEO, Rhenovia Pharma. “It’s also time to disseminate worldwide the huge potential of Rhenovia’s breakthrough technology of modelling and simulating neuronal transmission under normal and pathological conditions in the brain, the eye, the spinal cord and muscular junction.”

While biosimulation is routinely used in almost all non-CNS therapeutic fields, such as cardiovascular or infectious diseases, oncology, asthma, or HIV, it is still an emerging technology in the field of mental, neurological, neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental diseases. “However, this should not be a hurdle. On the contrary it will be a great opportunity to make the search for new medications more efficient, and more generally to provide answers to major societal and economic challenges, showing Rhenovia’s technology can be applied far beyond drug discovery,” said Bischoff.

Rhenovia has already attracted partners from such diverse areas as the nutrition industry, for the prevention of diseases by optimizing food; defence ministries and organizations, to protect populations against war/terrorism neurotoxic agents; chemical and agrochemical industries and regulatory organs and stakeholders in the field of cleantech and eco-toxicity, which assess the neurological impacts of a great variety of active compounds and molecules.

“The deployment of Rhenovia in the US will accelerate our development, by helping to expand and diversify the markets for our biosimulation service offering, but also by intensifying our influence in industrial countries beyond France,” said Bischoff. “Rhenovia will also be looking to educate the US health, economic, defence, business and financial authorities and organizations about the huge potential of our biosimulation approach in the CNS area.”

Rhenovia Inc. will provide specific, customized offers for US pharma and biotech companies to markedly increase the productivity of their R&D, to reduce costs, time-to-market and risks of failures. It will also help US academic research groups and scientists to increase the understanding of basic mechanisms underlying diseases, while contributing more efficiently to healthcare and patients’ wellbeing.

About Rhenovia Pharma SAS

Rhenovia Pharma SAS is a biotechnology company which develops innovative solutions for the prevention and the treatment of Alzheimer’s and other diseases of the central and peripheral nervous system. Rhenovia is a world leader in the biosimulation of nervous system mechanisms in support of the drug discovery process. Its unique nervous transmission modelling technology makes it possible to reproduce on a computer the cellular and molecular mechanisms involved in learning, memory and a whole range of impaired brain functions associated with neurological diseases such as epilepsy, neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s or Parkinson’s disease and psychiatric indications such as schizophrenia and depression. Through its Rhenovia Drug Development Optimization Services (RHEDDOS) package, the company makes its technology available to biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies seeking to extend the life cycle of their medicines, develop new drug combinations, or identify new targets for therapeutic compounds. Rhenovia also works in the fields of security, agri-food, eco-toxicity and neurotoxicity.

Rhenovia also uses its biosimulation platforms to develop its own proprietary pipeline of drug candidates, to bring to a pre-industrial stage its prototype of a rate of controlled, in time and concentration transdermal drug delivery solutions for individualized medicine and analytical methods for the identification of drug efficacy/safety biomarkers.

Rhenovia’s headquarters are based in Mulhouse, France, and it has 20 collaborators in France, Switzerland, Germany and the USA. It was founded in 2007. The company has raised total funding of some EUR 3.5 million to date through commercial contracts, French and European calls-for-projects and public tenders, as well as from investors (including Alsace Business Angels and SODIV, a regional venture capital fund), state agencies and seed capital funds, in addition to the equity capital provided by its founders. For further information, go to: http://www.rhenovia.com