Vancouver’s CereCura Nanotherapeutics wants to leverage the same technology that powered COVID-19 vaccines to treat neurological disorders like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.
Spun out of the University of British Columbia (UBC), the pre-clinical biotech startup claims that it has already demonstrated an ability to effectively deliver multiple proteins to rodents’ brains, a step on the path to treating brain diseases. This is a longstanding challenge thanks to the restrictive blood-brain barrier (BBB).
Now, armed with $1.4 million CAD in seed funding, CereCura plans to validate the therapeutic efficacy of its lead drug candidate in rodents before proving it can deliver those same proteins to the brains of larger animals.
“We’re seeing this as something that will change the way we treat many diseases.”
CereCura co-founder and CEO Louis-Philippe Bernier is a big believer in lipid nanoparticle ribonucleic acid (LNP-RNA) as a means of delivering new therapeutics to the human body. “We’re seeing this as something that will change the way we treat many diseases, not just the brain,” the neuroscientist told BetaKit in an exclusive interview.
CereCura’s all-equity seed round, which closed in September, was led by Vancouver’s WUTIF Capital, with support from eFund, UBC Venture Funds, undisclosed angels, and existing backer HexTwo Capital. It brings the startup’s total funding to $2.2 million, a figure that includes $800,000 in pre-seed financing from late 2023. CereCura has supplemented this amount with just over $4 million in government grants to date.
CereCura was co-founded by renowned scientist and UBC professor Pieter Cullis, who developed LNPs, the drug delivery system that enabled the messenger RNA (mRNA) COVID-19 vaccines produced by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech. LNPs act as a protective capsule that protects fragile RNA and mRNA while they deliver genetic instructions to the body.
After completing his PhD in neuroscience at McGill University, Bernier spent the first part of his career at UBC studying various brain diseases and their causes.
“Academic research is fun,” Bernier said. “There’s a lot of discovery, a lot of new stuff that we find, but it’s not always something that can have a clear impact. We’re always studying what goes wrong in the brain, but it’s hard to fix it.”
After meeting with LNP pioneer Cullis, Bernier and his colleagues began adapting the newly “mainstream” LNP-RNA tech to the brain. “It worked out very well, very quickly, and we realized there was a commercial potential,” he said.
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Bernier described the company’s approach as “a twist on [LNP] mRNA technologies to improve protein delivery to the brain.”
While there is a lot of knowledge about what proteins cause brain diseases, Bernier said that getting proteins into the brain has been a longstanding challenge, given the BBB, which tightly regulates the entry of new substances.
The CEO noted that this is largely a good thing as it protects the brain from pathogens, but added that it also prevents many drugs from reaching the brain and represents one of the key challenges in treating brain disease.
LNPs offer a way of bringing “the mRNA blueprint that codes for the protein that we think would be therapeutic” to the brain so it can manufacture those proteins internally itself, bypassing the BBB.
CereCura’s lead program is focused on neuronopathic Gaucher disease, a rare ailment that Bernier said can be chronic, or even fatal, and is caused by one missing enzyme: glucocerebrosidase. The startup is also allocating some of its efforts to developing therapeutics for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. While Bernier said they are caused by multiple factors, he said there are multiple proteins that are proven as beneficial.
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Bernier noted that enzyme replacement therapy—a process involving producing the missing enzyme or protein in a lab and infusing it into the body via intravenous therapy—has existed for decades, but that its efficacy is limited in the brain.
The CEO claimed that CereCura’s “Trojan horse” approach, which leverages LNPs, has “a much longer half-life” of a week compared to direct injections, which only last hours.
“We decided to invest in CereCura because we were incredibly impressed by the team, their accomplishments, and their vision for the future,” WUTIF Capital COO Aaron Stuart told BetaKit. “We’re proud to support such a noble mission and see huge upside potential.”
Stuart believes that Cullis has the experience necessary to help guide CereCura on the long path towards commercialization.
CereCura’s goal is to build a pipeline of multiple pre-clinically validated drug assets, and Bernier is confident that the startup’s tech is versatile enough to facilitate this relatively quickly.
Feature image courtesy CereCura Nanotherapeutics.