Trevena is a drug discovery company focused on developing a new generation of medicines targeting G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs).
GPCR drugs account for >$40bn in worldwide pharmaceutical sales. These drugs were all developed based on a signaling paradigm of straight receptor agonism or antagonism via G-proteins. However, GPCRs do not only signal in this simplistic fashion but rather activate a network of downstream effects comprised of parallel signal transduction pathways. In particular, two families of such pathways appear to be ubiquitous across nearly all GPCRs: G-proteins and beta-arrestins.
Trevena is focused on generating ligands that are biased to switch on or off the G-protein and beta-arrestin pathways separately giving different biological responses. In effect, pharmacology can be optimized through selective signaling. Trevena has now developed a pipeline of novel, superior GPCR therapeutics based on biased signaling and has established a database of proprietary biological information on receptors across multiple therapeutic areas.