Everglades Biopharma is a Houston-based biopharmaceutical company developing ligand-based therapies for diverse diseases. Currently, the Company focuses on anti-angiogenic therapies against novel disease-specific ligands for vascular diseases, such as wet AMD, diabetic macular edema and cancer.

Everglades Biopharma was recently founded on the belief that therapies against disease-specific ligands will have higher therapeutic efficacy and fewer side effects than against non-disease-specific ligands. This belief is based on the proprietary technology of ligandomics, which enables global identification of cell-wide ligands with simultaneous binding or functional activity quantification. Quantitative comparison of the entire ligandome profiles for diseased vs. healthy vessels will systematically identify disease-specific endothelial ligands. In contrast, conventional approaches have to initially identify angiogenic ligands based on their functional activity in normal vessels and then characterize their disease relevance. Consequently, therapies against these conventional targets may affect normal vasculature with various degrees of side effects.

The Company has used this innovative ligandomics technology to successfully identify a dozen disease-specific angiogenic ligands as therapeutic targets. Everglades Biopharma focuses on the develop therapeutic antibodies for anti-angiogenic therapy of wet AMD and diabetic retinopathy.

The Company’s lead product candidate is a therapeutic antibody against a disease-specific angiogenic ligand. This ligand cannot binds to and induce angiogenesis of normal vessels. But its binding or angiogenic activity are significantly upregulated in diseased conditions, such as neovascular AMD, diabetic macular edema and cancer.  Blockade of this ligand by the antibody can ameliorate neovascular AMD and diabetic retinopathy with high efficacies and few side effects.