MIAMI: Armed with $1.5 million in grant money from the NIH, a pair of investigators at Harvard Med and Boston University are bootstrapping a small biotech upstart with an eye to pursuing candidate selection in animal studies for a new approach to treating Alzheimer’s disease.
Alzheimer’s so far has proven to lead to the valley of death for a multibillion-dollar effort by Big Pharmas looking to even slightly bend the curve on cognitive decline among patients. So a 7-figure initiative by a virtual biotech in the late stages of a preclinical neurodegeneration program comes with plenty of obvious concerns about the risk of failure.
The company, Klogene, is concentrating on Klotho, a protein that has been run through a variety of preclinical programs, demonstrating potential for a range of neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and ALS as well as multiple sclerosis. The growing anti-aging research community has also been enthralled by early signs that increased levels of Klotho make mouse models smarter–the kind of overall cognitive enhancer that may just help increase a healthy life span for the masses…