Sisaf, an innovative biopharmaceutical company with offices in Belfast and the south of England, has closed a $4.3 million (€3.69m) funding round at the same time as launching its first product on the US market.
The funding round was led by Vickers Venture Partners and supported by InvestNI and Innovation Ulster, the knowledge and technology venturing subsidiary of Ulster University.
The link up with Ulster University dates back to 2008 when Sisaf founder and chief executive Dr Suzanne Saffie-Siebert moved to Belfast with her husband who had started working with BBC Northern Ireland.
“I had planned to stay for a year or two but found the whole system there was great for the company,” she recalls. “I began working with the Nanotechnology and Integrated Bioengineering Centre (NIBEC) at Ulster University. A young company like ours needs diverse skills and we needed expertise in nanotechnology and how materials behave at very small scales. We’ve had a presence at the Catalyst Inc science park in Belfast as well as Ulster University ever since.”
Sisaf develops drugs using its bio-courier technology, Prosilic, a novel method of drug delivery based on a patented hybrid of porous silicon and liposomes. “There are many molecules in medical use today that have not reached their full therapeutic potential due to inherent limitations, such as limited efficacy, poor solubility, stability, or side effects. We don’t discover new drugs. Instead, we make existing drugs better, by formulating them with our Prosilic technology,” Dr Saffie-Siebert explains.
Things take so much longer in biotech than in other sectors like technology and investors
The Prosilic story goes back 25 years to when she was a pharmacy student at the University of London school of pharmacy. “Gene therapy was a very hot topic back then,” she points out. “My PhD project addressed a major challenge for gene therapy – how to target it for different applications.”
Courier system
The solution she worked on was the encapsulation of the formulation in a liposome, a spherical sac made of lipids (natural occurring fatty acids which are insoluble in water but will dissolve in the body). “The majority of the research was about how to put the molecules inside the liposome courier,” she notes. “This type of courier system is amazing. The body doesn’t see the lipids as foreign material so it doesn’t cause inflammation or an autoimmune reaction. It’s fully biocompatible. A lot of other couriers are good, but anything you can do to make it closer to the human body is better.”
Fast forward several years during which she moved to Italy to work for a pharma company to learn more about the topic. After that she worked for a UK Ministry of Defence commercial subsidiary on the development of a drug delivery system where the base material was silicon. She then moved on to do a business degree at Oxford Brookes University. "I had worked in pharmaceutical research all my life and I wanted to learn more about business. My thesis for that course provided the business plan for Sisaf."
That business plan addressed the key problem for most early-stage pharma enterprises, a severe shortage of capital. “Things take so much longer in biotech than in other sectors like technology and investors are not always willing to come in early enough,” she points out. “My proposition was to start out using the low hanging fruit of products with lower regulatory hurdles and to use the profit from that to feed higher risk product development.”
The idea for Prosilic came from her years in university and industry. “It came to me that a fantastic courier system would be a combination of liposome and silicon. Both have shortcomings but by creating a hybrid you create a completely new courier with all of the strengths and none of the limitations. I don’t believe you need more and more new drugs. There are a lot of beneficial compounds out there which suffer from the limitations of existing courier systems. Drugs are not smart. They don’t know if they are meant to go to the head, the heart, the lungs or the legs. That means you need high dosages just to get enough of the drug to where it’s needed. With our system you can get the drug to where it is needed very effectively so doses can be reduced and safety increased.”
The company has just launched its acne treatment product on the US market – an example of the low hanging fruit strategy. “Our relationship with Ulster University has been very beneficial as it has helped us to innovate. Innovation is the bread and butter of Sisaf. We now have a number of different pharma product pipelines which are already showing a lot of positive data. We have also received EU funding for MRSA and dermatitis products.”
Tim Brundle, Ulster University director of Research and Impact adds: “Sisaf was a spin in to Innovation Ulster and utilising the unique skill-set at Ulster University we were able to provide relevant research, field experts to provide growth and scale advice, peer support and networking opportunities. It is with a great sense of pride that we witness the meteoric success of Sisaf, rooted locally, competing globally and we look forward to seeing the impact Sisaf will have on the biopharmaceutical industry.”
