BioCentury
ARTICLE | Emerging Company Profile

Verva: Fingerprinting diabetes solutions

December 8, 2008 8:00 AM UTC

Traditional drug discovery for diabetes has begun with identifying a target responsible for triggering a reversible step in the disease pathway, such as dipeptidyl peptidase-4 or peroxisome proliferation activated receptor. Rather than go after a specific target, Verva Pharmaceuticals Ltd. is hoping to identify gene expression fingerprints for diabetes that can be used to screen for compounds that affect multiple diabetes pathways, perhaps reducing treatment to a single compound.

"We recognized that diabetes was multifactorial, and we wanted something that wasn't modulating a single process, but modulating broad changes," CEO Vince Wacher told BioCentury. "Ideally, you will be impacting multiple processes and, in turn, get a better compound."...