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日本経済新聞　2003/1/25

バイオＶＢ発掘・投資　三菱商事など国際育成組織に加盟　開発・販売連携探る

三菱商事、オリンパス光学工業、ＪＳＲ、信越化学工業がバイオベンチャー育成を目的とする米国の国際交流組織に加盟した。

国際交流組織はコスモス・アライアンス

　

The Cosmos Alliance

2003/1/14

The Cosmos Alliance Provides $6.5 Million in Bio Life Funding; Club Arranges Direct Investments and Global Collaboration for Breakthrough Bio Life Sciences Technologies
　http://www.ipo.com/venture/press.asp?p=IPO&prid=2795

Alliance members receiving investments were Panacea Pharmaceuticals, Inc. of Gaithersburg, Maryland; Sensatex, Inc. of New York, New York; EluSys Therapeutics, Inc. of Pine Brook, New Jersey; and Acugen Neuropeutics Inc. of Seattle, Washington.

The Cosmos Alliance has partnered with Mitsubishi Corporation to serve as its business integrator to develop corporate membership internationally. As one of the Alliance's first corporate member investors, Mitsubishi was instrumental in securing the founding Alliance members in Japan and is currently working with the Alliance to expand membership to Korea, China, Europe and the United States.

Panacea Pharmaceuticals, Inc.　 　　　http://www.panaceapharma.com/

Panacea Pharmaceuticals, Inc. is an emerging biopharmaceutical company focused on utilizing functional genomics and proteomics to develop therapeutic agents and diagnostic tests for diseases with substantial unmet clinical need. The Company's product development focus is on novel proteins and biochemcial pathways related to cellular regulation and cell cycle abnormalities in oncology as well as neurodegenerative diseases, particularly Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease.

Through Collaborative Research Agreements with major institutions, Panacea has access to state-of-the-art facilities and partnerships with internationally recognized scientists in the development of its core technologies. Further, agreements with support groups offering expertise in key developmental areas have been forged.

Panacea has also assembled a large group of world-class scientists and physicians for its Scientific and Clinical Advisory Boards, each with selected specialties that will help ensure the expedited development and success of the Company's projects.

Sensatex, Inc 　　　　　　http://www.sensatex.com/

Sensatex is focused on the commercialization of our Sensatex SmarTextile Technology and our SmartShirt System, a wearable solution for moving a wide range of information on and off an active person.

Sensatex has developed groundbreaking Interconnection Technology that allows sensing, monitoring, and information processing devices to be networked together within a fabric.

The Sensatex fabric was first developed by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Textile and Fiber Engineering under the auspices of the US military's 21st Century Land Warrior Program and the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the R&D arm of the US Department of Defense.

Our technology can be incorporated into any fabric (cotton, lycra, wool, silk, etc.) or blend of fabrics without effecting the look, feel or integrity of the fabric that it is replacing.

The SmartShirt System incorporates advances in textile engineering, wearable computing, and wireless data transfer to permit the convenient collection, transmission, and analysis of personal health and lifestyle data.

Described as "the shirt that thinks," the SmartShirt allows the comfortable measuring and/or monitoring of individual biometric data, such as heart rate, respiration rate, body temperature, caloric burn, and provides readouts via a wristwatch, PDA, or voice. Biometric information is wirelessly transmitted to a personal computer and ultimately, the Internet.

EluSys Therapeutics, Inc.　　　　　　　http://www.elusys.com/

EluSys Therapeutics, Inc. ("EluSys" or the "Company") is focused on the development and commercialization of the EluSys Heteropolymer System (the "Technology" or "HP System"), a novel platform technology to treat a wide variety of blood-borne infections and autoimmune diseases. The HP System should enable the rapid, safe and efficient removal and destruction of viral particles, bacteria, toxins and autoantibodies from the bloodstream by injecting a therapeutic compound into the patient. The HP System may be tailored to remove and destroy members of the major classes of blood-borne pathogen within several hours of administration, thus potentially providing an effective treatment for a broad array of different diseases.

To date, results of experiments conducted in live, non-human primates (monkeys) indicate that the HP drugs dramatically improved the removal (clearance) of various pathogenic substances (viruses, bacterial, toxins, and autoantibodies) from the blood of these animals relative to the rate of removal in the absence of the HP drug. Moreover, several experiments have shown that the clearance rate of a pathogen in the presence of an HP drug is much faster than the clearance rate of that same pathogen in response to an equal dose of the same monoclonal antibody in the form of a free monoclonal antibody (that is, not crosslinked to the anti-CR1 MAb). In one experiment in which the concentration of a model pathogen (a bacterial virus) was reduced approximately one million fold in response to an HP drug in approximately one hour, essentially no change was seen in the concentration of the virus in the monkey’s blood when an identical dose of free monoclonal antibody targeting the virus was administered.

Other experiments in monkeys have also indicated that the ability of an HP drug to promote rapid clearance of a pathogen can persist for at least several days after its infusion into the blood circulation of an animal. These results suggest that it may be possible to use HP drugs prophylactically. That is, it may be possible to treat individuals at risk of exposure to pathogens in advance with an HP drug so that if they are exposed, the pathogen will be rapidly cleared and unable to initiate an infection.

Acugen Neuropeutics Inc. 　　　　　　http://www.acugen-neuro.com/

Acugen Neuropeutics Inc. is a new Seattle based biotechnology company which plans to utilize long-term neural cell culture technology to develop various in vitro neural disease models. The company will screen drugs for various neurodegenerative diseases including glaucoma, macular degeneration and Alzheimer's disease in collaboration with other pharmaceutical companies or biotech companies. Acugen Neuropeutics will also focus on developing image based analytical devices and plastic wares for high content cell based screening, which will become especially important in the postgenomics and postproteomics era.