Hope for cystic fibrosis patients

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August 23, 2019
By Shellie

Story by WRAL TechWire

Path BioAnalytics (PBA), a precision medicine startup with ties to UNC Chapel Hill, has scored the rights to a new drug therapy offering hope to cystic fibrosis (CF) patients with rare mutations.

PBA will use its proprietary technology – an organoid platform using primary cells — to identify subpopulations of patients in which the drug candidate is effective. Cystic fibrosis is a fatal genetic disease affecting more than 70,000 individuals worldwide.

“Some of the currently approved CFTR (cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator) modulator drugs work well, but only for a subset of the CF population,” PBA’s CEO John Mellnik told WRAL TechWire.

“We believe that a small number of individuals with CF — who may not benefit from currently available CFTR modulators — could benefit from cavosonstat. PBA has the technology and infrastructure in place to find these individuals and continue the development of cavosonstat specifically for them in a highly targeted fashion. We don’t want any individual with CF to be overlooked simply because they are the only one with their particular CFTR mutations.”

PBA is a graduate of Launch Chapel Hill, an accelerator program based in Chapel Hill, as well as the Kenan Flagler Business School program formerly known as Launching the Venture (now known as Startup UNC).

Read the full story via WRAL TechWire.