Firm
Over the past eight (8) years, Scimitar Equity has consistently provided value-added intelligence and insightful investment analysis on emerging healthcare companies.
We identify and follow high impact, emerging technologies that are transitioning into attractive areas of commercialization.
Regenerative Medicine
Regenerative medicine is the process of creating living, functional tissues to repair or replace tissue or organ function lost due to age, disease, damage, or congenital defects. This field holds the promise of regenerating damaged tissues and organs in the body by stimulating previously irreparable organs to heal themselves. Regenerative medicine also empowers scientists to grow tissues and organs in the laboratory and safely implant them when the body cannot heal itself.
The current wave of regenerative medicine includes cell-based therapies, fully formed artificial tissue and stem cell therapies being introduced to the body in order to repair or heal ailments. Novel cell-based therapies promise to target challenging chronic conditions by arresting degeneration or restoring functionality.
The regenerative medicine market will grow exponentially from its current base of $1.8B to potentially more than $10B by 2020. The regenerative medicine field reverberates with potential implications for the $750B pharmaceutical and $200B medical device markets creating significant growth opportunities.
Regenerative medicine also has the potential to solve the problem of the shortage of organs available for donation compared to the number of patients that require life-saving organ transplantation.
Personalized Medicine
Personalized Medicine involves using the advanced tools of molecular genetics and diagnostics to predict how patients will respond to drugs, reducing harmful side effects and increasing benefit. These technologies can produce a personal medical profile that can guide the physician and patient towards selecting the most appropriate drug or treatment regimen and monitor its progress.
Stem Cells and Cell Therapy
Stem cells can now be grown and transformed into specialized cells with characteristics consistent with cells of various tissues such as muscles or nerves through cell culture. Highly plastic adult stem cells from a variety of sources, including umbilical cord blood and bone marrow, are routinely used in medical therapies. Embryonic cell lines and autologous embryonic stem cells generated through therapeutic cloning have also been proposed as promising candidates for future therapies. Their ability to grow into virtually any of the body's specialized cells is giving drug developers new ways to test drugs in the lab. In many ways, this may be viewed as an extension of personalized medicine, although we believe we are the first to do so.
Molecular Diagnostics and Imaging
Molecular Imaging is a new discipline that unites molecular biology and in vivo imaging; enabling the visualization of the cellular function and the follow-up of the molecular process in living organisms without perturbing them.
The multiple and numerous potentialities of this field are applicable to the diagnosis of diseases such as cancer, and neurological and cardiovascular diseases. Molecular Diagnostics already has great traction and is a critical component of the emergence of personalized medicine. Its utility in infectious disease is merely an entry point.
Monoclonal Antibodies
Have already become an important tool in biochemistry, molecular biology, drug discovery and medicine. The idea of a magic bullet was first postulated that if a compound could be made that selectively targeted a disease-causing organism, then a toxin for that organism could be delivered along with the agent of selectivity.
It is now possible to create monoclonal antibodies that specifically bind to that substance; they can then serve to detect or purify that substance. The second generation of MAB technology will be evolutionary but productive and profitable for those with the wherewithal and IP to take advantage of it.
Gene Therapy
Drugs work by binding with proteins that are the underlying cause of a specific disease. But a number of therapies in development seek to work by acting directly on genes that are responsible for producing the deleterious protein in the first place. There are several technologies for accomplishing this, whether it is the introduction of a gene through a viral vector, RNAi, antisense or the use of so-called zinc finger proteins.
A set of short strands of RNA known as microRNAs have emerged as a – new - means of diagnosing and treating disease.
MicroRNAs work by preventing the translation of messenger RNA into proteins or by initiating the breakdown of messenger RNA. The absence or presence of specific microRNAs in various cells has been shown to be associated with specific human diseases including cancer, viral infection, metabolic disorders, and inflammatory disease. What makes these small strands of RNA particularly compelling to drug companies is that they have the ability to not only up-regulate or down-regulate a single gene, but networks of genes as well.