An emerging area of drug development got more crowded Wednesday, with the debut of a biotechnology startup trying to create new migraine prevention therapies.
Vedana Therapeutics formed in response to an earlier class of migraine-thwarting medicines that first hit the market toward the end of the last decade. These medicines inhibit specific proteins, “CGRPs,” that play a key role in migraines by transmitting pain signals, widening blood vessels and triggering inflammation in the tissues around the brain. While effective for many, a large portion of patients — more than half, by some estimates — don’t respond to, or stop taking, CGRP-blocking therapies.
Vedana wants to fill this treatment gap with antibody drugs aimed at another nervous system protein, “PACAP,” which appears to drive migraines in a similar but distinct way from CGRPs. It’s not alone in that pursuit. The Danish company Lundbeck, through its $2 billion purchase of Alder BioPharmaceuticals in 2019, not only acquired what would soon become an approved CGRP treatment, but also an anti-PACAP drug that has succeed in multiple mid-stage clinical trials.
Tailing Lundbeck are two more developers: Mentari Therapeutics, which in May announced plans to go public through a reverse merger, and Slate Medicines, a newly formed biotechnology company that’s raised $130 million from blue-chip venture capital firms like RA Capital Management, Forbion and Foresite Capital.
