According to the company, the alliance will advance LiveLeaf’s drug development through its recently formed pharmaceutical subsidiary, Quellthera.
Quellthera aims to discover novel therapeutics based on plant immunity’s reactive biochemistries. The company was created to leverage LiveLeaf’s product safety record and study experience.
"Quellthera enables us to take a specific biochemistry and streamline its development into FDA approved drugs with specialist teams...a model that biopharma investors are familiar with," Alex Huang, Founder and CEO of LiveLeaf, told Outsourcing-Pharma.com. "We long ago recognized that the highest value and greatest impact of our technology is as a medicine that will be accepted and prescribed by physicians worldwide."
As per its partnership with Emergy Pharma, Huang explained its business model is to use a small number of "key alliances" with consulting teams for pre-clinical, FDA regulatory, and clinical study.
Huang said the goal is to leverage Emery Pharma's domain expertise, research talent, and state of the art equipment in order to accelerate drug development. "By outsourcing, LiveLeaf is able to delay costs of expanding our own laboratory facility and staffing," he said.
Emery Pharma will be providing microbiologic, analytical and medicinal chemistry and CMC work for FDA submission.
Harnessing biologic plant immunity
The LiveLeaf's technology harnesses "a central plant chemistry that nature has evolved to maintain a workable synergy between animals, plants, and bacteria," Huang explained.
"Potentially harmful pathogens typically only start to rapidly multiply and attack when they sense the conditions are right. LiveLeaf technology interferes with this sensing and neutralizes toxins that can lead to favorable conditions."
As a result, the bacteria either remain passive or halt their attack and can be naturally displaced by non-pathogenic gut bacteria. By not killing them, there is less evolutionary selection for survivors with drug resistance genes," he added.