Our Novel Approach

Updated: April 30, 2006

Why Lpath may be lower risk than the typical biotech company

Lpath's proprietary ImmuneY2™ drug-discovery engine generates monclonal antibodies against bioactive-lipid
targets, a novel approach that has distinct advantages,
as described below.		 How Meaningful Might This Attribute Be?
Advantages of targeting lipids vs. proteins (and nucleic acids)
Bioactive lipids—much smaller and simpler molecules than proteins—generally do not vary from species to species (our first target, S1P, does not vary at all; our second target, LPA, varies in insignificant ways).
When the target in humans is exactly the same as in mice (and in monkeys), compelling mouse (and monkey) data are more predictive of success in the clinical setting. Protein-targeted drug-development programs, on the other hand, face a sizeable "chasm of risk" as they migrate from animal models to humans, where the target invariably is different and might respond to the drug in very different ways.
Cancer cells (and other pathogenic cell types) can much more easily escape therapy by mutating around protein-targeted drugs vs. lipid-targeted drugs.
When the target is a protein, cancerous cells can "escape therapy" by mutating around the therapy; they do this either (i) through a form of natural selection, by "selecting" the isoform of the protein that the drug has least efficacy against, or (ii) by making a new version of the protein that the drug is less effective against (and cancer cells have already proven to be highly likely to mutate).
Antibodies that bind to lipids can attain certain efficiencies and potencies that protein-targeted antibodies cannot attain
A typical antibody usually binds/inhibits one, or possibly two, protein targets. Lipids are so small, by contrast, that each antibody can bind/inhibit more than two such lipid molecules, providing certain efficacies and potencies that typical antibodies cannot attain.
Advantages of monoclonal antibodies vs. small molecules
Lpath's collection of antibodies will interact extracellularly, "sponging" up the lipid target (similar to how Avastin® works).
When a drug interacts intracellularly, the safety risk increases.
Antibody drug candidates are, on average, considerably less toxic than small-molecule drug candidates.
This helps to explain why the antibody class of drugs is the fastest growing segment of the pharmaceutical industry.