The University of Texas Health Science Center and the Southwest Research Institute have licensed new uses for a drug that has shown it can slow the aging process to a San Antonio startup biotechnology company. <\/p>\n
The company, Rapamycin Holdings Inc., takes its name from the drug rapamycin, which has long been federally approved to suppress organ rejection in transplant recipients. <\/p>\n
Rapamycin Holdings hopes to one day commercialize the drug for anti-aging purposes. <\/p>\n
Instead of accepting physical and cognitive decline, we're looking for answers and solutions, said Rapamycin Holdings CEO George Fillis. Hopefully, the answer will be to extend healthy human life. <\/p>\n
Terms of the licensing agreement were not disclosed. <\/p>\n
So far, Rapamycin Holdings has raised an undisclosed amount in seed funding to conduct a series of analytical tests to determine how the drug performs on a therapeutic level in the bloodstream, Fillis said. <\/p>\n
The Texas Technology Development Center, or T3DC, and the Texas Research & Technology Foundation, are among the organizations that provided investment capital to the company. <\/p>\n
Rapamycin Holdings plans to raise an additional $6 million once it nears Phase 1 clinical trials for its first drug product. <\/p>\n
Z. Dave Sharp, a professor of molecular medicine at the health science center, in 2004 conceived the project to slow the aging process. <\/p>\n
The federal government later awarded about $5 million in stimulus money to the health science center to study rapamycin and its anti-aging effects in mice. <\/p>\n
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Continued here: The University of Texas Health Science Center and the Southwest Research Institute have licensed new uses for a drug that has shown it can slow the aging process to a San Antonio startup biotechnology company. Continue reading
\nUTHSC strikes licensing deal<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"