VentureBeat

At a first glance, San Francisco’s Nuon Therapeutics looks like any other specialty-pharmaceutical company that aims to pick up cast-off or failed drugs and try to squeeze some new life out of them. That sort of business model is frequently dull as dishwater, however lucrative it may turn out to be for the investors involved.

Unlike many specialty pharmas, however, Nuon — a recently renamed biotech transplant from Australia that just raised $5 million in a first round of funding — may actually have something scientifically interesting going on. The company, founded in 2002 as Angiogen Pharmaceuticals, does aims to find new uses for marketed drugs. But its first candidate, an old drug called tranilast that Nuon hopes to develop as a new kind of treatment for autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis, has a fascinating history that serves to illustrate how some older drugs might really provide unexpected medical benefit to large numbers of people.

Tranilast is one of those also-rans of the pharmaceutical world, notable mostly because a small Japanese pharmaceutical company sells it in Japan and South Korea as an asthma treatment. Several years ago, a unit of what later became GlaxoSmithKline tested the drug in a trial involving more than 11,000 patients, based on early evidence that it might prevent restenosis — the scar tissue that can re-block an artery after doctors wedge it open using balloon angioplasty or stents. Yet the trial failed earlier this decade, and tranilast slipped back into obscurity.

Until 2005, that is, when a team of Stanford researchers demonstrated that the drug could reverse paralysis in mice with a simulated form of multiple sclerosis. Tranilast, it turns out, bears a strong resemblance to a derivative of tryptophan — an amino acid found in turkey that was briefly (and wrongly) thought to encourage post-Thanksgiving sleepiness. These tryptophan relatives, however, did seem to have interesting effects on the immune system, which led a German postdoctoral student with funding from Angiogen to contact Stanford MS expert Lawrence Steinman and suggest that they test tranilast and other tryptophan derivatives against the disease in mice.

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