The surgeons who treat it call it “the most common crippling hand disease you’ve never heard of”: Dupuytren’s contracture, an incurable, sometimes painful disorder where cords of fibrotic tissue build up in the hand, causing the fingers to bend toward the palm.
“It’s so prevalent, but it hides in plain sight,” Kurt Harrington, a biotech industry veteran and founder of San Diego-based Ventoux Biosciences, told Fierce Biotech Research in an interview. About 5% of people in the U.S. have the disease, most of them over the age of 50. Harrington himself developed it much younger: Now in his 50s, his first symptoms showed up in his 30s. He’s since had multiple rounds of surgery and radiation to keep the condition at bay.
Those treatments and a drug called Xiaflex, marketed by Endo International, are the only therapies available to patients. Now, Ventoux is positioning itself to add another option. On March 12, the company announced that its lead candidate, a commercially available drug that the biotech has repurposed and renamed VEN-201, successfully reduces skin fibrosis in mice. Ventoux also revealed that it has launched a fundraising round to take the drug—the identity of which the biotech will not yet reveal—from preclinical research to a first-in-human study…
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