Joint Venture between Grupo TCI and an English company brings the fastest technology in the world for discovering new medicines to Brazil.

Through bioinformatics, e-Therapeutics is able to reduce the research time for the development of new medicines from two years to two weeks for known molecules.

The joint venture puts together a Brazilian company, Grupo TCI and an English company, e-Therapeutics, for research into Brazilian biodiversity, with plants from the Atlantic rain forests and the Amazon, with the objective of developing medicines to treat tropical diseases, such as hepatitis C, chronic pneumonia, Chagas disease, tuberculosis, diabetes type 2, and Leishmaniasis.

In Brazil, the two companies are going to undertake a selection process of Brazilian natural compounds as well as discovering new uses for existing compounds used in medicines. A pharmaceutical research and production cluster will be established, with the objective of bringing innovation in medicines rapidly to the market.

Through bioinformatics, the English company has developed the fastest technology in the world to analyse how a molecule from a plant, animal or micro organism will behave when consumed or injected into a human body. With this technology, e-Therapeutics has managed to speed up the discovery of new medicines. A conventional laboratory takes on average two years to repurpose an existing drug, where the English technology takes only two weeks.

Brazil will be the first country to use the English technology to discover new medicines. Until today, this technology has only been used with existing drugs. Professor Malcolm Young, who developed e-Therapeutics from the University of Newcastle, said that this joint venture is the beginning of a long term relationship between his company and Grupo TCI in Brazil. “We are already working with South East Asia and India, but the opportunities for this new partnership in Brazil are beyond compare.”

“We are going to unite e-Therapeutics’ technology, the Brazilian biodiversity and Grupo TCI’s expertise in innovation management. This new enterprise will open the bottleneck for the development of new drugs for the treatment of the main Brazilian diseases,” explained Roberto Marinho Filho, President of Grupo TCI.

Professor Malcolm Young, Chairman of e-Therapeutics agreeing the joint venture with the Presidente of Grupo TCI, Roberto Marinho Filho.

Further Information

• Prof. Malcolm Philip Young – Director of the Complex Systems Group and Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the Faculty of Science, Agriculture and Engineering at the University of Newcastle in England. His group’s research expertise is based on the analysis of complex systems and informatics. His recent work includes 6 publications in the Journal Nature and Science and 12 in the Proceedings and Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. He is one of the 18 scientists of the world nominated by the Sunday Times for “Brains behind the 21st Century”.
• Mr. Christopher C. R. Dawes –President of Eureka, a company linked with the University of Cambridge in England and specialising in business development; primarily in the areas of strategic planning, sales and marketing. He also specialises in the commercialisation of innovative technology developed by English universities to create new businesses.