• The new paradigm developed by Pharnext targets all of today's major unmet medical needs (i.e. diseases that lack satisfactory treatments) by moving from conventional monotherapy to PleotherapyTM based on biological networks and extensive proprietary new knowledge.
• The need to consider complex biological networks associated with a given disease for drug discovery is well documented (*). It has now been clearly established that each biological function is executed by a complex set of molecules, proteins and metabolites (sugars, lipids, vitamins, metals and so on) orchestrated into a single network. The activities of all the molecules in the same network are interconnected; if the activity of one molecule varies, the activities of the others will vary in such a manner that the network's functional state is maintained. This is why living systems can be said to rely on regulated molecular networks. Since this regulation is robust, changing the state of a network by- modifying the activity of a single molecule is rarely achieved. In most cases, changing the state of a function requires multiple actions on several molecules in the underlying network. This is also true of the triggering process for diseases, most of which are multifactorial. Moreover, different parts of the same network will be affected in different patients, resulting in disease heterogeneity - the same disease, the same network but different disease mechanisms. 
• In this context, the PleotherapyTM approach consists in combining in a single, patented PleodrugTM, mini-doses of several drugs already approved by healthcare authorities for other diseases that are unrelated from a clinical viewpoint but linked in terms of the underlying biological networks. PleotherapyTM is based on network pharmacology and targets several molecular nodes in a disease-perturbed network and thus helps to increase the treatment's efficacy and safety; thanks to the synergy between the drugs in the "cocktail", doses 10- to 100-fold lower than usual can be administered. PleodrugsTM can be patented.
• Network robustness is the basis of the scientific rationale whereby diseases might be better treated by simultaneously targeting different proteins in the same network. It is well established that many diseases (such as cancer, arterial hypertension, bacterial infections, immunosuppression, AIDS, etc) are better treated by using several drugs simultaneously (i.e. multi-target combination therapy), each of which modulates the activity of a given protein in the same network). This is the principle behind the increasingly popular  "network pharmacology" approach, which aims at treating diseases by combining actions against different targets in the same network.
• The characteristics and advantages of PleotherapyTM

(*) Nature Chemical Biology, Nov. 2008, vol 4 n°11; Nature Reviews Feb. 2009, vol 8 n°111; Nature Reviews April 2009, vol 8 n°287; Nature Insights Rev. 2008, vol 461.