Empowered Patient Podcast Innovative Homeostasis Focused Drugs to Treat Root Causes of Disease with Steve Butts Arrivo BioVentures
Steve Butts, Co-Founder and CEO of Arrivo BioVentures, is a biopharmaceutical company focused on developing therapies that target the root causes of disease rather than just treating the symptoms. Their drugs treat major depressive disorder and acute pancreatitis through novel epigenetic mechanisms of action. Sex-based differences were observed in clinical trials where the drug SP-624 showed efficacy in females but not in males, which could lead to a paradigm shift in how depression is treated in men and women.
Steve explains, "We've evolved over time at Arrivo and with our previous companies. What we're excited about right now is the fact that we have two drugs. One called SP-624 or Forvisirvat is the generic name, and the other one is code-named RABI-767. And as we've gotten into the science behind these drugs, what we're finding is that we're not just treating the symptoms of a disease, but we're really trying to get at what's causing the disease fundamentally and trying to make an impact there. And I think from a drug development standpoint - I've been doing this for 30 years - these are the two most exciting programs that I've had a chance to work on for a variety of reasons. One is the science, and they're both novel and new approaches to treating the diseases, but two, if we're right, they're going to create a situation where we're going to think about these diseases differently."
"We ran a large Phase 2 study. It was the first study we had run in patients with depression, and it was really the first study that anyone had run with a SIRT6 activator in patients with depression. And so we were breaking new ground there, and it was a pretty large study. When we got the results, what we found was that there were really nice effects in females across all of the measures that we had and no evidence of efficacy in males. And that was really puzzling to us. It wasn't what we were expecting. And we started diving into, well, what could be going on here? Science is iterative, and I think you do a trial, and trials lead to more questions. And so we started diving into the questions that we had around “Why the sex difference?”
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