Short Bio
Born in 1971, withdrew from the doctoral program at the Graduate School of Agriculture, Kyoto University. I involved in contract manufacturing of oligonucleotides therapeutics business management, GMP production system construction, and oligonucleotides therapeutics drug seeds creation as a general manager of sales and technical support department, executive officer, and director (in charge of business) at GeneDesign Co., Ltd. of nucleic acid drug CDMO. In December 2017, co-fund Luxna Biotech Co., Ltd. and became president in February 2018.
Luxna Biotech has developed antisense drug discovery platform based on the bridged nucleic acid technology originate from Prof. Satoshi Obika group of Osaka University. Luxna also has been collaborating with pharmaceutical companies for novel targets including spinal cord injury and small cell lung cancer from academic research.
Today, we’d like to introduce our most advanced project, spinal cord injury treatment antisense drug development. The glial and fibrotic scars form a physical and chemical barrier to axon growth after spinal cord injury (SCI) and chondroitin sulfate (CS) is presumed to play a pivotal role for the neuronal regeneration. Our strategy is the inhibition of biosynthesis of CS with antisense oligonucleotide (ASO).
ASOs were designed with our proprietary nucleic acids to match both of mice and human CSGalNAcT1 mRNA sequences. It was found that some ASOs demonstrated efficacy in mice SCI model with minimal in vitro hepatotoxicity and cytotoxicity. There was no adverse event occurred in normal Cynomolgus monkey safety study. Non-clinical GLP studies are planned to start in late 2021.