North Carolina-based PhytoMyco Research Corporation (PMRC), a biopharmaceutical company, received a Small Business Innovative Research grant (SBIR Phase I) from United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). PMRC plans to use this fund to characterize its lead anti-fungal agent.
Following SBIR feasibility testing and product development, PMRC plans to submit a Phase II grant in February 2004 and subsequently try to commercialize in collaboration with major corporations.
PMRC discovered a microbial extract from its natural product library and demonstrated its novel mechanism of action in controlling economically important fungi. The chemistry of the lead compound and analogs could facilitate the control of several fungal diseases. The knowledge of chemical structure of the lead would also permit synthesis and testing of analogs. The market value for a well-defined anti-fungal agent with a novel mechanism of action could potentially be worth millions of dollars worldwide, according to a company release.
PMRC has an extensive Natural Products Library (NPL) that has already yielded several novel cardiovascular drug leads.
In the last four years, the company's founder and head Dr. Ven Subbiah with 20 years of R &D experience in natural products at industries and academia built a library of 5000 botanical extracts from around the world and purified them into 25,000 well-defined phytochemicals. His efforts in the lab and in the fields of North Carolina and Mysore, India (where a staff of six does agronomy and extractions) have formed a broad and well-characterized library of potential pharmaceutical leads. The high quality of the NPL has led to research contracts with DuPont Pharmaceuticals, RJR Nabisco, Sigma-Aldrich and the National Cancer Institute (NCI). These contracts and four state grants have funded PMRC until now and enabled it to equip state-of-the art labs at the TEC Center in Greenville, NC, for its extract supply business and initial high throughput receptor testing.
The three business components of the company are: Drug discovery, development of new nutraceuticals and contract supply of plant and microbial extracts. For the drug discovery programme, proprietary assays were developed to detect ET receptor antagonist to treat cardiovascular diseases using their unexplored Ethnopharmaceutical sources. It is also developing nutraceutical products (based on Ethnopharmacology formulation, validated through in-house proprietary transcription, cell-based assays and other technologies) to treat hypertension, obesity, diabetes, and potentially other disorders such as, inflammation. The company shares its natural product extracts libraries with pharmaceutical and nutraceutical companies in developing new products, which has generated short-term revenues and established business relationships with major pharmaceutical companies.