Potential Synergy Between Obesity and Myopathies

In this Pharmaceutical Executive video interview, Hanadie Yousef, PhD, co-founder and CEO of Juvena Therapeutics, and 2023 Pharmaceutical Executive Emerging Pharma Leader, discusses Juvena’s fusion protein JUV-161, which enhances muscle regeneration and metabolism by AKT signaling. JUV-161 targets myotonic dystrophy type one and other muscle-wasting diseases. Juvena is also developing JUV-112 for obesity, targeting adipose tissue without appetite suppression and muscle loss. She also addressed how their platform uses quantitative proteomics and artificial intelligence to identify and validate proteins for therapeutic use.

Pharmaceutical Executive: Given the focus on both myopathies and obesity, how does Juvena see the potential synergy between these therapeutic areas, particularly in terms of patient populations or underlying biological mechanisms?

Hanadie Yousef: A few things. One of Juvena’s core theses right now is this concept around improving movement to promote health. One of the reasons why, despite me as a founder building Juvena with the concept of being able to actually leverage the platform across all tissues and diseases associated with aging, we really first focus on muscle. Because if we can improve muscle function, metabolism, and strength, it leads to improved mobility. That leads to improvement in all organ systems, including better cognitive thinking, memory, heart, lung, liver, and fat health in terms of our metabolism and ability to stay healthy. That was one of the reasons we started with muscle. Muscle, fat, bone, and the immune system form a core, intricate system of communicating with one another to manage and modulate your metabolism, the nervous system, and the signals you get from your brain in terms of controlling appetite.

Our goal is very closely tied in the sense that the goal is to really build this map of metabolic health and map of proteins that can modulate muscle to also improve our adipose tissue health, to improve other organ systems and really promote that better cross talk between our organs. That's the way that it relates.

We're finding that things that work on muscle ultimately will work on fat and vice versa. Juvena is aiming to have a toolkit to ultimately promote metabolic health and treat metabolic disease, no matter what organ an individual might be having cause some of the issues in their body versus other people.