Company profile
UK company 04255391, incorporated on 19 July 2001.
Pentraxin Therapeutics Ltd is a University College Londonspin out company founded in 2001 by Professor Sir Mark Pepys FRS. In September 2011 Sir Mark retired as head of medicine at the Royal Free Campus of UCL and became the first Director of the new UCL Wolfson Drug Discovery Unit, which he created with funding from
Company number 04255391
Reference milestones and recent Companies House filing stream events.
Company registered at Companies House
The Company was set up by UCL Business (the commercial arm of UCL) to hold and commercialise all intellectual property arising from Professor Sir Mark's work at UCL. Pentraxin has been financed by UCL Business and the current shareholdings are held as 45% by Professor Sir Mark Pepys, 45% by UCL Business, 5% each by Professor Philip Hawkins and Professor Steve Wood. There are four Directors, Professor Sir Mark Pepys and Mr Cengiz Tarhan (representing UCL Business), Professor Hawkins and Professor Wood. The majority of Pentraxin's research work is carried out at UCL with certain aspects being out-sourced to third parties. The company has three main programmes under development: 1) CPHPC, a small molecule compound, in combination with an anti- Serum amyloid P component (SAP) mAb for the treatment of systemic amyloidosis. This programme was licensed by GSK in 2009 2) Inhibitors of C-reactive protein (CRP), developed for the treatment and prevention of tissue damage; and 3) a compound for the treatment of hereditary systemic and senile cardiac amyloidosis targeting depletion of transthyretin. This programme was licensed by GSK in 2010. Sir Mark is also preparing to trial his drug CPHPC in three different studies in patients with Alzheimer's disease, cerebral amyloid angiopathy and traumatic brain injury respectively . The company's website can be found at www.pentraxin.com
The company has supported Professor Sir Mark's research work for many years and facilitated the licensing of CPHPC from Roche and proceeded with the GMP manufacture of CPHPC - for use in clinical trials on patients with systemic amyloidosis at UCL. A licence deal was signed with GSK in February 2009 to enable GSK to develop an application combining a humanised antibody with CPHPC to eliminate amyloid deposits. Clinical trials with the combination are currently in progress (see URLs http://www.clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01406314?term=amyloid+gsk&rank=4 and http://www.clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01777243?term=amyloid+gsk&rank=2.). In November 2010 GSK also licensed Prof Sir Mark Pepys's transthyretin superstabiliser programme. Sir Mark's group worked closely with GSK on this programme. Sir Mark's group also collaborated closely with GSK's scientific advisory arm, Scinovo, on his CRP inhibitor molecule programme.
