Proprietary Platform Technology
Sirona Biochem has expertise in the development of carbohydrate-based molecules. Essential to life, carbohydrates, or sugar molecules, have broad potential for ground-breaking pharmaceutical and cosmetic development as they play a critical role in most of the major diseases. Carbohydrates are implied in a wide range of biological functions, cell/cell communication, immunity and cancer development. It is thus their central role in the communication between cells and their ability to interact with proteins, hormones, viruses, toxins or bacteria which make carbohydrate-based molecules major candidates for the development of new curative treatments for cancer, viral infections, inflammation and many other areas.
Despite this immense potential, a major limitation of carbohydrate molecules is their lack of stability. When coming into contact with omnipresent enzymes, for example, carbohydrate-based molecules can easily break down or become toxic, making them difficult to produce as pharmaceutical products.
Sirona Biochem’s French subsidiary, TFChem, has developed a proprietary chemistry technique that maintains the integrity of carbohydrate-based molecules even after enzyme exposure. Through years of award-winning research by our synthetic chemists, we have learned how to strengthen the bond of a carbohydrate molecule by strategically placing fluorine atoms within the molecule. This technique has yielded several compounds showing promise for the development of different kinds of therapeutics, cosmetic agents and as biological ingredients for laboratory use.
Our research so far has demonstrated that by applying our chemistry technique we can enhance the stability and bioavailability of carbohydrate-based molecules. Since the modulations induced by the introduction of fluorine atoms onto a molecule has a major influence on its behavior within the biological medium, it’s not surprising that fluorine is now present in 20 to 30 % of the drugs of the market. However, our proprietary fluorine-based chemistry platform not only gives our company the chance to develop new robust compounds, but also allows us to improve previously-developed compounds by other companies. Those compounds may have otherwise been put on hold because of the inherent challenges of carbohydrate-based chemistry.
