Startup Insights: Umbed Pharmaceuticals

Our next participant in the Startup Insights campaign is the Life-Sciences company Umbed Pharmaceuticals. They want to revolutionize the way anticancer and peptide drugs are infused going from the ineffective intravenous infusion to oral nanomedicine products. With a great team and a strong board there are well on their way. Elevator Pitch: A number of anticancer drugs are dosed by intravenous (IV) infusion due to the poor solubility and bioavailability upon oral administration of these drugs. Additionally, a similar problem exists for systemic and local administration of peptide drugs. IV administration is expensive and the low dosing interval leads to systemic side effects due to the need for high dosing. Oral reformulation can overcome these problems and pave the way for improved cancer and peptide therapies. With an expanding global market of $88bill. and a growth rate of 12.3%, the anti-cancer market segment comprises more than 80% in this market. Umbed pharmaceuticals will develop new drug products by reformulation of IV anticancer drugs and peptide drugs to oral nanomedicine products. This offers significant increase in patient compliance and comfort, drastically reducing the administration costs and reduces additional risk related to IV dosing. Umbed has developed and tested a production platform, which makes use of existing stand alone manufacturing technology, thereby reducing development time and costs. Product description: The Umbed technology platform provides a one-step high throughput production of nano-embedded microparticles intended for nanomedicine products to enhance the oral bioavailability of small molecule and peptide drugs. Unlike competing nanoparticle preparation processes, Umbed’s technology produces a powder-based end-product ready for downstream processing into the final dosage form. Our powder-based nano-embedded microparticles allow for sterile production, a versatile range of nanomedicine dosage forms, increased product stability and superior product reproducibility. Why did you apply for the Accelerace program? We applied for the Accelerace program to get help with business strategy and business development as we do not have any prior experience with business and product development.  The Accelerace program has been helpful for us in defining a viable business model and in defining important operational goals as well as helping connect with the right people. How did your company start, and how did you get the idea? The company started as one of several pharmaceutical related startup ideas we were working on at the time beside our main research project. It came to our minds that many of the current methods for preparing drug-loaded nanoparticles are inefficient and do not allow easy scale-up for commercial scale manufacturing. We figured that our idea would therefore be useful for the industry and for development of new nanomedicine products. The next day we assembled a test set up of the technology and as it worked out very well so we decided to file a patent application. Other big news about your company? We have received the Novo Exploratory Pre-seed grant and are currently working on obtaining more funding. Fun fact / information about your company: Our company name originates from Micro(µ)embed Pharmaceuticals but we are in fact working on a technology for nanoparticles Founders:  Jorrit Water,  Adam Bohr Employees: 2 (the founders) Headquarters:  Copenhagen Year Founded:  2015  ]]>