October 8, 2020
MEDIA RELEASE
Cummings joins NatGlycan as Chief Strategic Advisor
Tucker, Georgia October 8, 2020
NatGlycan is pleased to announce that Dr. Richard D. Cummings has joined the company as its Chief Strategic Advisor. In this role, Dr. Cummings will help NatGlycan in developing new product strategies and corporate collaborations to maximize the opportunities for applications of NatGlycan’s growing expertise in purifying and characterizing glycans for applications in functional glycomics.
Dr. Cummings is the Director of the National Center for Functional Glycomics and Professor in the Department of Surgery at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School in Boston. He is an internationally recognized expert in the field of functional glycomics and was a co-founder of Selexys Pharmaceutical Inc. in Oklahoma City, OK, which developed SelG1, an recombinant anti-P-selectin antibody. Selexys was acquired by Novartis in 2016 following results from a Phase II trial evaluating the use of SelG1 (now approved as the drug Adakveo) for the reduction of vaso-occlusive pain crises in patients with sickle cell disease. Dr Cummings was Dr. Song’s postdoctoral mentor at Emory University School of Medicine, and he and Dr. Smith have been long-time colleagues and collaborators.
About NatGlycan LLC (www.natglycan.com)
NatGlycan, LLC was established to make biologically relevant natural glycans available at costs that are compatible with academic research budgets. Co-founded by Dr. David Smith, Dr. Xuezheng Song, and Dr. Janice Kimpel, NatGlycan is focused on providing these glycans in ways that will allow the research community to discover and define their roles in human physiology and disease. NatGlycan operates a laboratory in Tucker, GA with capabilities for both upstream and downstream processing of glycans from a wide variety of starting materials.
CONTACT:
Janice Kimpel
Chief Business Officer
September 23, 2020
MEDIA RELEASE
NATGLYCAN LLC AWARDED PHASE II SMALL BUSINESS INNOVATION RESEARCH GRANT FROM NIH
• The grant, for over $1.7 million, will support NatGlycan’s work to become the pre-eminent
producer of natural glycans for research and a key partner for discovery research involving such
glycans.
• Reviewers from the National Institute of Health’s panel were “enthusiastic about NatGlycan’s
business strategy”, indicating that it represents “innovation that will serve an unmet need”
Tucker, Georgia September 23, 2020 NatGlycan LLC announced the funding of its Phase II SBIR grant from
NIH for over $1.7 million over the next two years.
This award follows from the successful execution of a Phase I SBIR grant for $0.3 million, during which the company demonstrated the feasibility of its novel process, Oxidative Release of Natural Glycans (ORNG), to produce large quantities of glycans for the glycoscience community for the first time. Quotes from submitted letters of support by noted research glycobiologists include:
- “the quantities of material NatGlycan is able to produce will allow us to do studies
that were not possible in the past” - “the availability of these reagents will tremendously aid the glycobiology field”
In the work proposed for the Phase II project, the company will enhance its manufacturing facility to produce high purity isomers of N-glycans and derivatives that will be useful to the glycobiology community. This will include N-glycans representing all of the structures expressed on human serum IgG for use as standards for quality control in manufacturing of monoclonal antibodies; currently an
unmet need in the pharmaceutical industry. Since ORNG releases all classes of glycans simultaneously from natural products, NatGlycan will expand its product offerings, including the major O-glycans which are in great demand, but not yet available, at reasonable cost.
By the end of Phase II of this project, NatGlycan expects to be offering over a hundred N-glycans and more than 50 O-glycans, all at >95% purity, in multi-milligram amounts. It has become well accepted now that a major function of animal cell glycans is to interact with glycan binding proteins or receptors (GBP) in interactions that are important in normal physiology and disease. Dr. David F. Smith and Dr. Xuezheng Song, co-founders of NatGlycan, in collaboration with their longtime colleague, Richard D. Cummings, have identified such glycan-protein interactions for influenza virus from pig lung, antigenic glycans from Schistosoma mansoni, human milk glycan receptors for rotavirus, and human milk glycans that bind galectins and DC-SIGN. They are currently working with NovAb Inc., who is developing plasma cell-specific antibodies to treat plasma cell malignancies in humans, to develop glycan microarrays to screen for plasma cell-specific antibodies. The major limitation for the research community in successfully completing functional studies of glycans is the availability of milligram quantities of purified glycans, which was the major motivation for the development of ORNG and the founding of NatGlycan.
About NatGlycan LLC (www.natglycan.com)
NatGlycan, LLC was established to make biologically relevant natural glycans available at costs that are compatible with academic research budgets. Co-founded by Dr. David Smith, Dr. Xuezheng Song, and Dr. Janice Kimpel, NatGlycan is focused on providing these glycans in ways that will allow the research community to discover and define their roles in human physiology and disease. NatGlycan operates a laboratory in Tucker, GA with capabilities for both upstream and downstream processing of glycans from a wide variety of starting materials.
CONTACT:
Janice Kimpel
Chief Business Officer
kimpel@natglycan.com