and up to 40 percent may not respond well,” said Henry Shin, Ph.D., Excitant’s CEO and co-founder of the company along with Jian-xing “Jay” Ma, MD/PhD, and Adam Duerfeldt, Ph.D. “With our technology, we are developing a first-in-class orally available drug for diabetic retinopathy and age-related macular degeneration, with differentiated disease modification profiles, to alleviate the treatment burden associated with the current standard of care,” Dr. Shin said. The compound Excitant is using to tackle vision damage was discovered in the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center laboratory of Dr. Ma, a renowned vision researcher. It was redesigned and improved in Dr. Duerfeldt’s laboratory through a research collaboration. Dr. Shin was a graduate student and post-doctoral fellow in Glow-in-the-dark Dr. Ma’s lab, while Dr. Duerfeldt was protein called a medicinal chemist on OU’s Norman luciferase. Image Credit: Creative campus. “Dr. Ma spent 20-plus years Commons License 2.0 Credit: Oregon investigating diabetic retinopathy, State University. Flickr and the work that culminated in the formation of Excitant revolves around his collaboration with Dr. Duerfeldt, who is now at the University of Minnesota,” Dr. Shin Henry Shin, Ph.D. said. “The collaboration focused on designing and synthesizing new Jian-xing “Jay” Ma chemical entities that selectively activate a protein called PPAR-alpha Adam Duerfeldt, Ph.D. (peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor alpha), which when activated decreases symptoms of diabetic retinopathy.” OU funding supported research by the trio as they sought a compound that showed potential to treat the condition. “We based our scientific approach on two large clinical trials that tested a drug therapy intended to reduce cardiovascular Dr. Robert Holbrook events in Type II diabetic patients,” Dr. Shin said. “The therapy wasn’t so successful for cardio, but there was a robust effect on diabetic retinopathy instead.” They founded Excitant in 2019 to translate their discoveries. Excitant has since received approximately $1 million Small Business Innovative Research grants from the National Eye Institute, which Dr. Shin described as “validation” of their science by peer reviewers. “It also enabled us to identify and develop a promising small molecule that shows therapeutic effects in rodent models of diabetic retinopathy and age-related macular degeneration,” Dr. Shin said. As CEO of a life sciences startup, Dr. Shin not only conducts high level research, but stays current on scientific literature and Insufflation learning about other scientific disciplines that would be helpful Retention Device as the company’s R&D needs evolve. (IRD) “Our tentative plan is to reach Investigational New Drug approval from the Food and Drug administration within the next The IRD is an three years,” he said. add-on device, So, how does the name “Excitant Therapeutics” fit a company intended to make that is immersed in R&D for compounds to prevent vision loss for colonoscopies safer millions of people worldwide – without requiring eye injections. and more efficient. 8
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BIO Edition 2022
The term “Excitant” was adopted from the scientific research process and substances that elicit active physiological or behavioral responses, Shin said. The founding scientists used cell-based assays to screen hundreds of newly synthesized compounds. “This assay uses a light-producing enzyme called luciferase, and it generates bioluminescense when provided the right stimulus,” he said. “We imagined this process as a tiny celebration, because we’ve found a molecule that “excites” the cells. As a result, we named our company Excitant Therapeutics.” Now that’s something to get Excitant about. Excithera.com
A LIGHT ON THE SUBJECT Of the more than 20 million colonoscopy procedures done in this country annually, roughly 20 percent of them are disrupted by a common obstacle: the patient’s colon can’t retain air. Why is that a problem? During a colonoscopy, physicians insert a device known as an endoscope – a tiny camera and a long, flexible tubular instrument that transmits an image of the lining of the colon – into the large intestine through the patient’s rectum. But the colon must be inflated for doctors to navigate and look for potential problems like polyps. “It becomes important to the physicians when they need to do something – they’ve identified a polyp or there is some bleeding -- and if we can’t see what we are doing that creates more problems, said Dr. Robert Holbrook, a Norman-based gastroenterologist and inventor. Dr. Holbrook founded a company in 2017 called BPEndo to advance a patented plug device he invented to solve the lack-ofinflation problem that often challenges physicians during the colonoscopy procedure. When the colon won’t inflate, nurses and technicians are called in to assist the physician in manually holding the patient’s body to keep air from escaping. “When we do that, it takes that person essentially out of the room,” Dr. Holbrook said. “They can’t do their normal tasks because they are trying to help us simply visualize the colon, which is normally pretty
