Q
Iperboreal Pharma, established in 2003, is a developmental stage pharmaceutical company primarily focused on researching and developing life-saving medicines and hospital products for the treatment of critical illnesses and diseases.
Thanks to the substantial skills and experience in the international pharmaceutical industry, Iperboreal Pharma's management closely controls these outsourcing activities. Iperboreal Pharma has also established several research collaborations with Academic Institutions.
Our areas of interest
- Chronic renal failure
- Peritoneal Dialysis
- Innovative Hypertonic solutions
- Medical devices
Our strategy
Iperboreal Pharma's strategy is to implement a cost-effective architecture, minimising infrastructure and overhead costs while maximising access to world-class expertise.
While ideational phases are carried on inside Iperboreal Pharma (therapeutic targets
identification, preclinical pharmacology, engineering, prototyping etc.), industrial development phases are carried out externally through commercial partnerships with companies specialized in each concerned field of activity.
In Iperboreal we believe that knowledge and research are the keystone for a successful strategy.
Our goals
Our goal is to develop research programs up to the industrialization stage and finalize commercial agreements (licensing, co-developing) and partnerships with pharmaceutical and biotech companies around the world. This scheme helps us to shorten the time needed to deliver our products to the market and generate profits and public benefits.
This goal is strictly connected to our intellectual property protection that is the main asset of every research based company.
We are also specialized as a preclinical CRO, or preclinical contract research organization, that provides the experience, knowledge, and skill required to take a pharmaceutical product or medical device from the drawing board to distribution.
Why "Iperboreal"
An old map representing the mythical island of Thule, known to the ancient Greeks as the fabled land of Hyperborea.
On maps, Thule usually appears north or northwest of England and Ireland or in the northernmost parts of Asia. It has been associated with early reports of Greenland, Iceland, Norway, or the Shetland Islands.
“Never on land or by sea will you find the marvelous road to the feast of the Hyperborea”
Pindar
Our areas of interest
Chronic terminal renal failure
What lies behind chronic renal failure
How to deal with ESRD
Peritoneal Dialysis
Innovative Solutions
Medical devices
It has been estimated that people suffering from Chronic Renal Failure worldwide are 500 million, of whom more than 1.8 million are under dialysis treatment (ESRD).
These numbers tell us something very important: today most of the countries in the world are not able to bear the economic burden of a constantly larger number of patients in ESRD and in 10 years span many of them won’t even be able to provide a therapy to their citizens.
Our job is to solve this problem, today.
Diabetes mellitus is the leading cause of ESRD, approximately 35% of newly diagnosed cases, followed closely by hypertension, approximately 30%.
Other causes of ESRD include primary and secondary glomerulapathies, cystic and interstitial renal diseases, and obstructive uropathy.
ESRD is irreversible and lethal if untreated. Life expectancy for adult individuals affected by ESRD is still less than a decade, making this disease similar to other serious chronic illness such a cancer.
ESRD represents a public health burden that could become unsustainable in about a decade.
The treatment options for ESRD patients are a kidney transplant or dialysis.
Transplant can’t be a solution because of the shortage of suitable donors (and the incidence of organ transplant rejection).
The majority of patients must rely on dialysis procedures: haemodialysis (HD) and peritoneal dialysis (PD).
The former procedure is the most common modality, in which a machine and artificial kidney (semi-permeable membrane) is designed to remove toxins and water from a patient's blood.
HD patients typically travel to a dialysis clinic three days per week for 3-4 hours per session.
PD is similar in principle to HD: toxin and water removal and water occur through the patient's peritoneal membrane, a large membrane surrounding the organs below the diaphragm. The patient's abdomen (body cavity) is always filled with dialysis fluid, dialysate, a specially designed solution also known as peritoneal dialysis solution (PDS).
The most common PDS contains large amounts of glucose and physiological amounts of sodium, calcium, and magnesium. The presence of glucose in the dialysate draws water, by the process of osmosis, but stress the peritoneal membrane too, leading in a peritoneal filtration impairment due to fibrosis after about four years of treatment. Furthermore, during heat sterilization, glucose is degraded, generating glucose degradation products (GDPs), which have been shown to inhibit cell proliferation and to cause necrosis of fibroblasts, macrophages, and human mesothelial cells in vitro. It has also been demonstrated that GDPs are very potent agents of no enzymatic cross-linking of proteins and can lead to the formation of advanced glycation end products (AGEs). In addition, absorption of glucose may be associated with metabolic problems such as hyperglycaemia, hyperinsulinemia, hyperlipidaemia and obesity.
Thanks to a key collaboration with an important health care provider of home-based therapies, Iperboreal Pharma has developed a new set of hypertonic solutions containing low amounts of glucose, more biocompatible and well tolerated by the peritoneal membrane.
We have conducted a number of in vitro and in vivo studies, which have shown that our hypertonic solutions are more biocompatible than those based on glucose only.
The presence of carnitine and xylitol, as active osmolar agents, provides additional benefit to the impaired glucose and lipid homeostasis present in both diabetic and insulin resistant patients.
Iperboreal Pharma is also committed in developing innovative medical devices in the PD field.
Indeed, our set of hypertonic solutions will be coupled with a number of medical devices to form the basis of an Integrated Therapeutic System that uses the best technologies to offer a safe and personalized PD treatment.
By means of a modular cycler, we will be able to adjust PD therapy according to the patient’s needs. Furthermore, we’re developing a new generation of connectors easy-to-use and capable of guarantee an aseptic exchange of fluids to protect the patient against bacterial contamination.
© 2017 Iperboreal Pharma. All rights reserved.
P.I. IT 01702360684