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Prevalence of Covalent Drugs  Covalent drugs have been approved for the treatment of a number of indications and have made a major impact on improving human health. There are more than 38 FDA-approved covalent drugs in the areas of oncology, anti-infectives, CNS, inflammatory, and vascular and gastrointestinal disorders. Three of the top 10 blockbuster drugs in the world are covalent irreversible inhibitors (Annual 2009 sales numbers: Plavix, $9.8 billion; Nexium, $5.2 billion; Prevacid, $2.3 billion). However, the majority of today's approved covalent drugs were discovered serendipitously and were not rationally designed as covalent drugs. At Avila, we realized that there is a robust way to solve major therapeutic problems by taking a systematic and rational approach to design and test covalent drugs—this is enabled by our proprietary Avilomics™ platform. Due to advances in computational drug design and Avila's unique insights into structural informatics, a new class of targeted covalent drugs is possible through rational design of drugs capable of bonding with high specificity to disease-causing proteins. Avilomics™ is our foundation for the robust development of targeted covalent drugs. As just one example: Only a small fraction of the hundreds of druggable kinase targets are being pursued. More than 100 are addressable using Avila's targeted covalent approach. We are now extending Avilomics to many protein families. 
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