Fovea: Seeing through animal eyes

Demand for therapeutics in many degenerative ophthalmologic indications remains largely unmet because the diseases are so poorly understood. Fovea Pharma SA hopes to carve out a niche in treating back-of-the-eye diseases using a discovery platform based on retinal cell assays and animal models.

The company's discovery platform is "based on proprietary assays that were assembled to create what we call a high-content screening platform using primary retinal cells that come from different animal models," said Chairman and CEO Bernard Gilly, who will be leaving his post as partner at Sofinnova Partners to run Fovea. "The platform was developed by the INSERM Unit 592 and was validated through INSERM's collaboration with Novartis over several years. During the collaboration, they found the first trophic agent involved in protection of photoreceptors, which was published in Nature."...