Vivan Therapeutics Achieves Milestone for ECHS1 Therapeutics Discovery

London, United Kingdom - March 1, 2023 

Vivan Therapeutics, a biotechnology company, today announced that the first two milestones have been achieved in their quest for a treatment for ECHS1 deficiency.  ECHS1 deficiency is a rare congenital metabolic disorder caused by biallelic mutations in the ECHS1 gene. Individuals with this mitochondrial condition typically have signs and symptoms of developmental delay, dystonia, seizures, and brain abnormalities.

Vivan’s Drug Discovery Process is used to develop in vivo models of genetic disease in fruit flies, Drosophila melanogaster, which they call ‘avatars’. The company then uses robotics to screen thousands of FDA approved drugs, along with other drug libraries to identify potential therapeutics. 

The first objective was to generate fruit fly models for the rare disease caused by loss of function of the ECHS1 gene.  Loss of function of ECHS1 was produced by expressing short hairpin RNA interference (shRNAi) for the Echs1 orthologous gene. Echs1 shRNAi was expressed ubiquitously in all tissues, to reflect germline deficiencies.  The second objective was to identify lethal phenotypes and conditions suitable for high-throughput drug screening. Vivan has now achieved these milestones and is ready to embark on the next step - the identification of drugs and/or drug combinations that rescue lethal phenotypes.

Chief Scientific Officer, Dr. Nahuel Villegas commented, “Our fruit fly models are specifically engineered to recapitulate diseases with genetic components. We are very excited about the therapeutic alternatives that could be identified by employing the Echs1 model coupled with our platform to run massive drug screenings “

The company is pleased to announce that it is ready to proceed with therapeutics discovery and is seeking partnerships with foundations, families or other groups to assist with funding this effort. Vivan CEO Laura Towart notes, “It is difficult to secure investor funding for rare disease therapeutics discovery- even when it is possible to identify life changing therapies relatively inexpensively using drug repurposing.”  Please contact Vivan Therapeutics if you are interested in joining this endeavor.

About Vivan Therapeutics

Vivan Therapeutics develops personalised therapeutics for cancer & rare genetic diseases. For each patient or disease, we build a genetically matched fruit fly model, which is used for large-scale drug screening to find novel and effective drug combinations. Using our proprietary screening data, we are building a powerful AI-driven digital health tool, which can predict effective treatment options rapidly for GI & lung cancer. Our platform also powers biopharma discovery and development internally and with biopharma clients and collaborators.

For general information, visit www.vivantx.com or contact us at info@vivantx.com