How Pardes Biosciences Helps Stop The Pandemic and Prevent The Next

The global pharmaceutical market has experienced significant growth in recent years. As of end-2020, the total global pharmaceutical market was valued at about 1.27 trillion U.S. dollars. This is a significant increase from 2001 when the market was valued at just 390 billion U.S. dollars. 

Pardes Biosciences is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company created to help the world with pandemic-sized problems such as COVID-19.  It was founded in 2020 to promote change and help lead the way to a post-pandemic future by leveraging their collective experience in discovering and developing oral drugs with the potential to address the issue and health problems that are most relevant nowadays.

The company focuses on applying the modern reversible-covalent chemistry platform which consists of “warheads” that are designed to be both reversible in nature and tunable in their reactivity to form a temporary covalent chemical bond with a target protein. Using reversible covalent chemical bonding may give their drug candidates improved properties, such as enhanced activity and selectivity, and may reduce the likelihood of “off-target” reactions that could cause undesirable side effects. Pardes’ chemistry platform and approach have the potential to be adapted for use against other viral and human targets.

Team

Pardes Biosciences is located in Carlsbad, California, United States. It has 8 investors including T. Rowe Price and Frazier Healthcare Partners and said to have raised $126.6M. Pardes has gathered an experienced Management Team, Board of Directors, and Strategic Advisors, and is rapidly growing its team. Pardes appointed Thomas G. Wiggans to assume the role of Chief Executive Officer and Chair of the Board of Directors who has over 40 years of biopharmaceutical industry experience, including over 25 years in chief executive leadership roles.

Together, they bring extensive experience discovering, developing and commercializing a broad range of therapeutics. Above all, they share a commitment to leading-edge the biopharma business model to solve some of the most crucial health challenges faced globally. 

The budding method for treating and preventing coronaviral infections is to target the Viral Main Protease (Mpro), a highly-conserved protein required for the earliest stages of coronavirus replication, this will help to stop the virus to replicate. The highly conserved nature of Mpro across multiple coronaviruses, including SARS, MERS, and emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern, supports the potential of this target for both known and potential future coronavirus strains and variants. These insights led to the design of PBI-0451, a coronaviral Mpro inhibitor with demonstrated in vitro activity against multiple strains of coronaviruses. 

Their lead product candidate, PBI-0451, has been evaluated in pre-clinical in vitro models and has shown activity against multiple coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-2 and variants of concern such as Delta, other human coronaviruses of pandemic potential (SARS, MERS), as well as common cold-related coronavirus strains (OC43, 229E). PBI-0451 is currently being studied in a blinded, randomized, and placebo-controlled dose-escalation Phase 1 clinical trial enrolling 180 healthy adult volunteers at a leading clinical research center in New Zealand.

Growth and losses

In January 2022, the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) cleared Pardes’ Investigational New Drug (IND) application for PBI-0451. In February 2022, It presented data at the 29th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) 2022. In March 2022, It presented data at the 35th International Conference on Antiviral Research (ICAR) 2022. There was a net loss of $21.4 million for the quarter ended March 31, 2022, as compared to a net loss of $4.5 million for the quarter ended March 31, 2021. The net loss was driven by an increase in research and development expenses, as well as increased costs related to the infrastructure needed to support Pardes’ growth and transition to operating as a public company.

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