CoCo Therapeutics created in UK to progress retinoic acid receptor alpha agonist for Alzheimer's

King’s College London, The Wellcome Trust and Advent Venture Partners have announced the formation of a new UK biotechnology company, CoCo Therapeutics Ltd, to progress the research of Jonathan Corcoran into the development of new treatments for Alzheimer’s disease.

The company builds on the success of research funded through the Wellcome Trust’s Seeding Drug Discovery initiative investigating the role of the retinoic acid receptor, RAR-alpha, and molecules that act on it in Alzheimer’s disease.

The Neuroscience Drug Discovery Unit at King’s, led by Prof Corcoran, has been optimizing compounds for treatment of CNS disorders since 2008. The group has previously shown that molecules that act on RAR-alpha can affect multiple parts of the Alzheimer’s disease pathway and therefore have the potential to produce an effective therapy that would otherwise need several points of intervention from different drugs. CoCo Therapeutics will now take forward the lead compound into late-stage preclinical studies and clinical trials, which is the next step towards assessing whether the approach has any therapeutic benefit in patients.