Hartford Business Journal

20 Hartford Business Journal • September 5, 2016 www.HartfordBusiness.com Cornovus' treatment aims to prevent heart muscle cells from dying By John Stearns jstearns@HartfordBusiness.com O ne particular patient underscored Dr. Bruce Liang's mission to help people with advanced heart failure live longer. The patient was a caretaker for several family members, despite being physically compromised with a heart functioning at half capacity. Liang kept the woman stable for seven years before, within about a year's time, her heart function significantly deteriorated. He called colleagues, searching for answers he might have missed. There were none. She was in her 70s when she died, worried not about herself, but those she was leaving behind, Liang recalled. Liang, a clinical cardiologist and research- er at UConn Health since 2002 and dean of the UConn School of Medicine since 2015, had been conceptualizing a potential new drug treatment for people with advanced heart fail- ure before the woman died. He and Kenneth Jacobson, a chemist with whom he's collabo- rated for about 20 years, had already begun to develop a synthetic molecule they thought could help such patients, but the woman's death motivated Liang to accelerate the pace. Her age and coexisting medical condi- tion meant she couldn't be a candidate for a cardiac transplant or ventricular-assist device, an expensive piece of hardware to help a failing heart pump blood. "She wasn't a candidate, so we had nothing," Liang said. Jacobson, focused on the chemistry, and Liang on the biological application, co- invented a potential new medication that worked well on mice with similar heart fail- ure conditions and later on dogs, where it also worked well. The drug, derived from the synthetic molecule, apparently prevents heart muscle cells from dying. "The heart has limited ability to regener- ate itself, but also dies in the condition of heart failure," Liang said. "If you have more … cells dying than you can regenerate, then the net effect is you have fewer, good viable contracting muscle cells and then [the]whole organ fails. We think our drug is preventing the death of heart muscle cells." Liang formed Cornovus Pharmaceuticals Inc. in 2011 to pursue a treatment for what he says is an unmet need for such heart-failure patients because there's no medication for them. The name represents "cor," for heart, and "novus," meaning new. In August, Cornovus solidified the final piece of roughly $3.5 million in fund- ing needed to do the additional preclinical testing Liang hopes will cement Cornovus' case for investigational new drug, or IND, approval from the Food and Drug Admin- istration (FDA) in about 18 months. After that, human tests could begin. At that point, Cornovus would need to secure more fund- ing from venture capitalists or work with a pharmaceutical partner to cover what could be a $20 million stage of human testing last- ing another six or seven years. But getting IND status reduces the risk by more than half for future investors, Liang said, increasing the odds Cornovus can land a deep- pocketed partner for human clinical trials. The new medication is noteworthy, said Jacobson, director of the bio-organic chem- istry lab at the National Institute of Diabe- tes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases at the National Institutes of Health outside Wash- ington, D.C. "It fills an unmet medical need and it would be a lifesaving treatment, so I think it's highly significant and there appear to be no serious adverse effects in animals, so quite likely it will prove to be safe," Jacobson said. The medication is a nucleotide deriva- tive, he said, adding there are many drugs on the market that are from this class of compounds, nucleosides and nucleotides. "So this is already a member of a well- validated class of medicines … ," he said. The initial market for the drug, for patients with advanced heart failure for whom trans- plants or ventricular-assist devices are not an option, is an estimated 500,000 to 600,000 patients in the U.S. and Europe, where Corno- vus' patents are issued, Liang said. But that's just the start. If Cornovus proves its drug works on those patients, it would seek to use it in patients who are less sick, but also have heart failure, to try to prevent their disease from progressing to a more advanced stage, Liang said. Patients in Building Bioscience A N H B J S E R I E S O N C T ' S B I O S C I E N C E S E C T O R from page 1 UConn Medical School Dean Bruce Liang has been developing Cornovus Pharmaceuticals' therapeutic remedy for heart failure as a part-time endeavor, working on the technology after hours and on weekends. H B J P H O T O | J O H N S T E A R N S

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