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Developing novel treatments for patients suffering from seizures, depression, and other neuropsychiatric disorders
Chris Cashman is Chairman and CEO of Marinus Pharmaceuticals. As a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company, Marinus Pharmaceuticals is dedicated to improving the lives of people suffering from neuropsychiatric disorders such as seizures and depression. To meet the needs of these patients, the company has developed a ganaxolone, a neurosteroid that acts on anti-seizure and anti-anxiety receptors in the brain. The drug is currently being evaluated in clinical trials for the treatment of pediatric genetic orphan epilepsies, behaviors in Fragile X syndrome, and status epilepticus.
EDWIN WARFIELD: How did you manage to get investment from Bain Capital?
CHRIS CASHMAN: The Bain conversation was the culmination of a long conversation that I had with Adam Koppel and Ricky Sun. It actually started when they were both at Biogen. We were talking at that point about ways that Marinus could work with Biogen: How could the two companies work together? What kind of programs would be interesting and focused on? But along the way, both of them left Biogen and went to Bain, and obviously the conversation continued, but less from a licensing standpoint and more from was there an investment opportunity for Bain. The Bain fund—this is not a public fund; it’s actually a private fund, so it’s a little bit off-center for them, but they felt that the proposition of the work we were doing at Marinus was attractive enough for them to make a sizeable investment in the company.
Q. What development milestones are you hoping to achieve next?
A. We have three indications we’re going for. I’ll maybe use one as an example. For CDKL5, this is the first time these kids have ever been really studied clinically for seizure control. So, on a lot of respects, we are paving new ground there; we’re pioneers. The challenge with these kids is that there’s not very many of them. There’s less than 1000 globally, so, we do not have the luxury to run huge, double-blind, placebo-controlled studies. We’re working with the FDA to craft a development plan that deals with the realities of this limited population but yet gives them the comfort that we can demonstrate to them that our drug works in these kids and works in a sustained way. We’re going through that right now and the goal there is we will work through that—and they’ve been very cooperative, they’re very good to work with, and it’s just a matter of making sure each other's needs are being met. We will work that out, and then coming out of that will be a program going forward that hopefully will lead to positive results, and the studies will lead to an approved drug.
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