Space - The Future is Here

It is November 26, 2018, and humankind has just landed the InSight probe on Mars, where it will study the planet’s interior. The landing site – a flat, relatively rock-free area in the western portion of Elysium Planitia – was chosen with pinpoint accuracy, and is centered at 4.5°N 135.9°E. No trial and error here.

This is technology at its best.

 

 

Medicine - The Future is (Almost?) Here

Meanwhile, back on Earth, humankind is develop a technology that can reliably deliver a drug treatment to a specific location in the brain with the same pinpoint accuracy. This technology will revolutionize the treatment of central nervous system (CNS) disorders. There is no doubt that someone needs to introduce a disruptive mindset and flip the current pharmaceutical R&D paradigm on its head.

 

 

Bionaut Agent is the Future

That someone is us. We named our company “Bionaut” to evoke the image of an astronaut moving within a biological environment (much like space). Then, we made this concept a reality, thanks to the development of groundbreaking remote-controlled microscale robots—or Bionauts—designed to deliver biologics, nucleic acids or small molecule therapies locally to targeted CNS disease areas. 

 

Ambitious? Maybe, but our vision is a direct solution to targeting debilitating CNS conditions such as glioma and Huntington’s disease.

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1. Roughly half of all approved medicines treat diseases that are local in nature where precision targeting with Bionaut therapeutics could offer efficacy and safety that can’t be achieved by other modalities.

2. Existing “precision medicine” treatments are unable to actively move to specific, localized targets in the human body. This means that treatments with good on-target efficacy often demonstrate poor off-target safety.

3. “Trial and error” based optimization of safety vs. efficacy makes pharmaceutical R&D expensive and inefficient, leaving ~90% of treatment candidates to fall by the wayside during the FDA approval process.

 

For example, one may consider designing a chemotherapy drug wrapped in a layer that preferentially binds to specific cancer cells. The hope in this case would be that the chemotherapy drug will exclusively target cancer cells, and avoid healthy tissue. Unfortunately, evidence shows that this approach is often subpar, as the drug still has to rely on blood flow or diffusion in tissue to reach its target. This lack of precision means that the concentration of drug that actually reaches the target cannot be reliably predicted, and clearance from the body presents a significant challenge. Furthermore, due to the statistical nature of the delivery (via blood flow or diffusion), the drug may accumulate in areas where it is not needed, or completely miss its intended target.

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