"These parasitic diseases take an enormous personal, social and economic toll on communities in the developing world, affecting millions of individuals and also decimating the cattle herds that are an integral part of rural economies," said Upstream CEO Joel Bellenson in announcing the Pacific Pharma acquisition in August. "We believe the growing interest in addressing global health issues makes this an ideal time to pursue new drugs for these devastating conditions, and we intend to work collaboratively with a variety of public and private organizations to ensure the timely and cost effective clinical development of drug candidates generated by our new technology platform."

 

Upstream also announced the related filing of a provision U.S. patent entitled: "Method for combining 3D quantitative chemical structure activity relationships (QSAR) of compounds with genetic variation of drug targets and metabolic enzymes to optimize efficacy, provide predictive toxicology, and address drug resistant microorganisms." An offshoot of its biomarker discovery efforts, genetic variations Upstream identifies (as well as those compiled from the public domain) will be incorporated into the company's new program and will provide information relevant to drug metabolism, hopefully providing clues as to drug efficacy and patient susceptibility to toxicity or resistance.

 

"The innovative drug discovery approach we are developing complements the core competencies we are applying in our biomarker discovery programs and potentially positions us to expand into additional therapeutic areas," Bellenson says. "The provisional patent filing we announced today brings together these two programs, covering methods for applying data on genetic variations that we will generate in the biomarker program to our computational drug discovery activities."