Following the transaction, Principia will continue under the leadership of Principia's Founder and President, Christopher P. Prior, Ph.D. Principia's goal is to develop safer, more effective and more convenient protein therapeutics and biopharmaceuticals for serious chronic diseases, using its proprietary molecular engineering and protein manufacturing technologies. Delivery of current therapeutic proteins in a manner that is both safe and effective has been an industry challenge for some time. One key problem has been that biopharmaceuticals often do not last long enough in the bloodstream to maintain a therapeutic level, and thus, high doses and frequent injections of the biopharmaceutical products are typically needed. Principia's recombinant albumin fusion technology is intended to provide longer acting forms of many important biopharmaceuticals by genetically fusing the therapeutic protein to albumin.
Albumin is a very abundant and natural protein in the blood.
When fused to therapeutically active proteins, the active proteins are anticipated to have the long circulating life of albumin. Prolonging the activity of the therapeutic protein in this manner may offer a reduced dosing frequency and could lead to reduced side effects in patients. For more details see Backgrounder . Moreover, from the product development aspect, we are extremely impressed by Principia's progress in therapeutic protein candidates which should be accelerated considerably when combined with HGS' drug development and genomics expertise. Currently, when a protein is manufactured, an individual process must be designed to recover the desired protein from the cells and other materials used to produce the protein.