Drug firm raises cash for targeted therapy

Curidium Medica, the AIM-listed drug development company specialising in "personalised medicine", tapped investors for more cash yesterday to develop its treatment for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

This follows the company's discovery of a blood diagnostic test, named PsychINDx, which classifies patients with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder into four subgroups. Until now, schizophrenia was considered as one disease and treated as such, not always effectively.

But the company hopes to develop drugs that will target the patient depending on which subgroup of the disease they suffer, from instead of the "one-size fits all" treatment currently available.

Though still a tiddler with a market capitalisation of less than £20m, the company is the only one based in the UK that is working in the realm of personalised medicine for the treatment of central nervous system (CNS) disorders. It raised £2.5m by placing 100 million new shares with investors at 2.5p apiece, increasing its equity by more than one-fifth. Its shares nonetheless rose 3 per cent to 3.62p yesterday.

Curidium could expand into other treatment areas, such as inflammatory diseases. The market for schizophrenia drugs is worth several billion pounds. AstraZeneca's Seroquel is the main treatment for the condition.

Anne Bruinvels, chief executive and founder of the London-based company, said only 40 per cent of patients respond to schizophrenia drugs, so there is a great unmet need for effective treatments.

Mick Cooper, an equity analyst at Blue Oar Securities, said CNS is an "incredibly complicated" area of research as nobody really understands how the brain works. He said that in future, patients will be given a genetic test to determine which sub-disease group of the illness they belong to and can then receive targeted treatment. "This will cost the state less as there will be less trial and error in using treatments," he said.