More than three decades ago, a discovery rooted in Nigeria's natural landscape began a journey that would evolve into a focused pharmaceutical effort addressing one of the most pressing unmet needs in modern medicine. Immune Modulation, Inc., a California-based biotech company founded in 1995, is built around that journey, translating a plant-derived compound into a drug candidate now being prepared for regulatory pathways in Parkinson's disease.
Dr. Emmanuel A. Ojo-Amaize, the company's founder and CEO, explains that the origins of the work trace back to a compound identified by Professor Joseph Okogun, a natural products chemist in Nigeria. "We were not starting with a finished idea," he says. "We were starting with a question about what this compound could actually do, and that question shaped everything that followed." According to him, early external evaluations had not identified significant applications for the compound, which led the team to examine it from a different perspective.
