Development Pipeline

Sirona Biochem has obtained an exclusive, perpetual worldwide license of the Core Technology for the purpose of developing, commercializing and selling a new class of SGLT inhibitors for the treatment of Type 2 Diabetes and Obesity, and to sublicense such rights to third parties.  If research and development efforts are successful, the SGLT inhibitors produced will be “stable mimetics”.  TFC has agreed to develop and undertake a research program with the goal of discovering a chemical process to achieve the synthesis of such a class of SGLT inhibitors on the Corporation’s behalf.  TFC has applied for a patent for this process and anticipated molecules, which will be licensed to the Corporation.   Future additional patents may also be filed.

The Core Technology

Glycoconjugates is the general classification for carbohydrates covalently linked with other chemical species.  Glycoconjugates are very important compounds in biology and consist of many different categories such as glycoproteins, glycopeptides, peptidoglycans, glycolipids, and lipopolysaccharides.  They are involved in cell-cell interactions, including cell-cell recognition, and cell-matrix interactions.  As such, many important pharmaceutical compounds are glycoconjugates Glycoconjugate compounds suffer from instability.  They are easily hydrolyzed (split into smaller units in the presence of water; for example, sucrose is split into glucose and fructose).  In pharmaceutical usage, glycoconjugates are hydrolized at glycosidic linkages by the action of glycosidase in the small intestine.  This means that a large portion of the drug is broken down before reaching the intended cells, thus resulting in low absorption efficiency. 

Pharmaceutical companies in the course of developing more efficient compounds have already developed technologies for the replacement of the oxygen anomeric in glycoconjugates by Sulphur, Nitrogen or CH2, which are known to be more stable than Oxygen. Unfortunately, the stability obtained is generally not strong. Strong stability can be obtained with the use of CH2, but that it is detrimental to the electronic structure of the glycoconjugate compound, thus reducing its pharmaceutical efficacy.

TFC has developed the Core Technology.  The Core Technology works by replacing oxygen atoms at a strategic position in sugar molecules with carbon bearing fluorinated atoms.  The substitution of fluorinated atoms for oxygen in the sugar molecule using the Core Technology produces “fluorinated sugar mimics” with great stability and efficiency.