About

Fighting human disease is one of the biggest challenges of the 21st century and contributing to that is a great goal to any company in the fields of Health & Life Sciences. There is a group of close to 100 diseases called Protein Misfolding Diseases, which are related to the inappropriate folding of specific proteins. It includes major diseases like Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s and Type 2 diabetes, as well as other diseases (ALS, Amyloidosis, Huntington’s, etc) that affect fewer people but their consequences are devastating. Most of these diseases have no cure at the moment; hence, finding drugs for them constitutes a huge unmet medical need. The global drug discovery market is anticipated to grow at a CAGR of 8.54% between 2019 and 2027 and generate revenue of $83.2 billion by 2027. ResQ Biotech is an early-stage drug discovery and development company aspiring to become a partner of choice for every Pharma & Biotech company that is developing drugs for protein misfolding diseases and looking for new assets to expand their pipelines.

Solution & Product

We exploit the tremendous power of biotechnology to advance the early-stage drug discovery process. We have generated genetically engineered bacterial cells that synthesize hundreds of millions to billions of molecules and simultaneously screen them for their ability to fix the problematic folding of target proteins. Our technology enables us to carry out the initial steps of drug discovery in a super-fast, easy and cheap way. The enormous number of molecules that we can study improves the probability of discovering an effective drug candidate. The category of molecules we develop (small cyclic peptides) are a new drug category that have not been extensively studied, thus providing a better chance for a clean IP landscape. The technology can be used to discover molecules for a large number of diseases. Our products are candidate molecules/drugs against protein misfolding diseases which will be licensed to larger pharmaceutical companies who want to enrich their pipelines, initiate clinical trials and pursue drug approval.

Innovation & Scalability

To increase the effectiveness of early drug discovery, we have engineered bacteria to function as a stand-alone, living discovery platform for drugs rescuing disease-related protein misfolding. In this technology, large combinatorial libraries containing up to tens of billions of small, drug-like cyclic peptides are biosynthesized in E. coli cells and simultaneously screened for their ability to rescue pathogenic protein misfolding. This technology offers crucial advantages: 1. Peptides can combine the 2. It investigates libraries with enormous diversities and increases the chances for identifying molecules with the desired properties. 3. It produces and screens previously untested molecules and yields new bioactive molecular entities without IP restrictions. 4. The initial discovery process is carried out in a simple bacterium - thus, its simplicity, speed and low cost are unprecedented. 5. It is a platform technology and can be widely applicable to many different PMDs, thus allowing a constantly expandable pipeline and scalability.

Traction & achievements

We have received awards in prestigious start-up competitions in Greece and abroad. We have secured significant public funding and we are in the process of closing our pre-seed round of private funding to perform preclinical development of our molecules target ResQ Biotech's first disease target. Major pharmaceutical companies have already expressed their interest in our technology and in testing some of our molecules.

Team & Why Us

Company team: 1. Dr. Georgios Skretas (Founder, CEO, CSO), with expertise in synthetic biology and protein/peptide engineering. was instrumental for developing the technology and is crucial in order to expand further its capabilities; 2. Dr. Dafni Delivoria (Co-Founder & CTO) is a chemist with a central role in the development of the technology from its initial steps and with experience in pharmacokinetic analyses; 3. Mrs. Athis Oikonomidou is an experienced business development and technology transfer professional having worked on out-licensing deals in the past. Our team members share the passion of using excellent science to address unmet medical needs that can help improve human life. Our combined expertise in synthetic biology, protein/peptide engineering, pharmacokinetic analysis, technology transfer and business development create a very strong and complementary core team. Our Advisors, Prof. George Georgiou and Dr. Kostas Vekrellis, provide additional expertise in neurosciences, oncology and drug development.

Funding Needs

Our first use disease target is the devastating neurodegenerative disease ALS. Full preclinical development of our ALS molecules will cost 3 to 5 million euros. We plan to finance it through a combination of VC funding and grants. The amount of VC funding we are looking to raise is 2.5 million and we have so far secured almost 1 million euros in grant money.