BioWorld International Correspondent

PARIS - Pharnext, a start-up that is developing new treatments for severe neurological diseases, raised €2.5 million (US$3.68 million) in seed funding from the French venture capital firm Truffle Capital.

Pharnext, which is based at the Santé Cochin business incubator in Paris, is pursuing a "drug repositioning" strategy aimed at finding new indications for existing drugs in pathologies other than those for which they currently have regulatory approval. The company is focusing initially on a number of orphan diseases, while simultaneously screening compounds in models of more common pathologies in the same therapeutic field.

Pharnext already has identified more than 50 generic drugs used to treat various diseases that could be adapted to improve the condition of patients suffering from Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease and other peripheral or central neuropathies. The company has been testing those molecules in vitro and in vivo since the beginning of October and filed its first patent applications arising from the results of that research in November.

The chairman, CEO and co-founder of Pharnext is Daniel Cohen, who spent a significant part of his past career with the French genomics company Genset until it was taken over by the Swiss pharmaceutical company Serono in 2002. Commenting on the closure of the initial funding round, Cohen said it would enable Pharnext to "select its first lead compounds with a view to clinical evaluation and file a number of patent applications. Pharnext's novel therapeutic approach is going to generate new treatments for severe and currently incurable diseases . . . We shall initially be focusing on neurodegenerative diseases, which affect hundreds of millions of patients worldwide."

For his part, the general partner and co-founder of Paris-based Truffle Capital, Philippe Pouletty, who is also a member of the Pharnext board, said the company had "all the right ingredients for a successful start-up," given its strong management and its "capacity to move lead compounds rapidly into clinical trials."

At the same time as completing the initial funding round, Pharnext announced the appointment of Jacques Attali to its board. Attali is a well-known writer who was a close advisor to French President François Mitterrand in the 1980s and subsequently became the first chairman of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.