Driving innovation in drug efficacy: why we invested in Theremia
15 November 2024
3 minute read
We are proud to be supporting Iris Maréchal, Chloe Geoffroy and the Theremia team as a co-lead investor in the recent €3m Seed funding round, alongside leading European investors Eurazeo, BPI France, Tiny VC and Entrepreneur First.
Theremia aims to help pharma companies improve their drugs’ efficacy, both of new drugs through development phases and existing drugs through reformulation. By combining real-world, longitudinal patient data across diverse cohorts with chemical compound drug formulation analysis, Theremia’s technology helps pharmaceutical companies maximise their new and existing drugs’ efficacy across the broadest population groups.
Pharmaceutical companies spend in excess of $200bn a year on R&D, over an average period of 12-15 years and up to $1-2bn per drug, in the hope of recouping their investment through sales between launch and the rolling off of patent protections. Given the cost and duration of the development process, speed to market is a critical component of pharma return on investment calculations.
Partly as a result of these constraints, drugs are often developed from data that aggregates population groups rather than being designed for, and trialled with, specific populations. Given that different patients may have different reactions and tolerability to the same drug, the result is that 60% of people receiving drug-based treatments are not being optimally treated, with efficacy levels and side effects differing considerably across different sub-groups of population by gender, ethnicity, environmental factors, age, physiology and genetics.
Therefore, pharmaceutical companies are becoming increasingly focused on reformulations and repurposing, as improving drugs that already exist in the market can increase the revenue opportunity at a fraction of the R&D cost through broadening the market or enabling patent extension. However, identifying opportunities for reformulation can be difficult, and spending time and money on testing a vast number of combinations to identify multiple optimal formulations for different patient groups can become too expensive or time-consuming to be viable.
There is enormous opportunity in creating a new category of data-driven drug derivatives, and Theremia has the chance to revolutionise drug discovery for pharma companies that have most commonly been focused on finding and developing novel compounds, while potentially under-commercialising existing drugs. The equally powerful opportunity to broaden the markets for drugs, particularly supporting patients from diverse backgrounds who are currently poorly supported by existing offerings should create long-term positive impact at scale from improving healthcare outcomes.
