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Gilead's next step is to reduce the number of medications HIV patients are generally required to take from three to two. By combining its Viread tablet with another pill, Emtriva, made by Triangle Pharmaceuticals (which Gilead acquired in a $488 million deal last January), the company hopes to lessen the risk that a patient might forget to take a pill. HIV patients commonly stray from the strict three-tablet regimen, with deadly results. Once patients start missing pills, their bodies stop suppressing the virus, which may have fatal results. Viread and Emtriva have to be taken only once a day, compared with twice daily for some others. Cutting down the frequency of doses reduces the chances for a patient to miss one. Drug companies would like to develop a single pill, which has so far proved difficult.
In the drive toward the one-pill solution, Gilead and big pharmaceutical competitors might want to pay attention to a small company in Maidenhead, England, called Procognia Ltd. Procognia helps drug developers and life-science companies analyze proteins for their drug potential. The market last year for drugs built from proteins cloned and grown in a lab rather than from chemicals was $33 billion, according to Reuters Business Insight. Procognia also helps investigate the reasons some proteins cause disease.
The problem with proteins as a drug source is that they often carry erratic hitchhikers known as glycans. These unruly carbohydrates tend to step onto the protein in unpredictable ways that can dramatically affect how the protein will work as a drug. Procognia has developed a chip that deciphers this glycosylation as it happens. A lab technician can then adjust conditions to end up with just the right glycans to make a stable protein-based drug. Johanna Griffin, president of Procognia's U.S. division, near Philadelphia, says traditional methods of glycoanalysis, like mass spectrometry and high-pressure liquid chromatography, can take as long as six weeks--far too long for technicians to adjust their current batches of proteins. This chip analysis could also potentially serve as a cancer screener by detecting whether protein cells show glycans associated with any form of that disease. Ron Long, Procognia's chief executive, thinks the diagnostic market will eventually be Procognia's moneymaker, but for now the company is focusing its glycoanalysis technology on drugs. "The hardest thing you can do in marketing," he says, "is take a new technology to a new market." Like many of its fellow pioneers, Procognia has other products under development, including a handy kit of protein samples that would allow biomedical researchers to study many proteins at once. CK Life Sciences, the fertilizer company, is working on a yeast-based drug that would help fortify the immune systems of AIDS patients. If this group of health innovators wanted to band together under one tag line to describe themselves, they might want to borrow a slogan that Mnemo uses to promote its amazing expanding strips of plastic: they are "the shape of things to come." --With reporting by Neil Gough/Hong Kong, Lauren Shepherd/Silver Spring, Chris Taylor/San Francisco, David Thigpen/Chicago and Daniel Williams/Canberra