Intract Pharma Limited London, UK (“Intract”), and Elasmogen Limited, Aberdeen, Scotland (“Elasmogen”) have announced a global license agreement that gives Elasmogen exclusive access to Soteria® and Phloral® technologies for oral colonic delivery of therapeutic proteins, deriving from Elasmogen’s soloMER™ platform, for an undisclosed target for treatment of Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis.
The license agreement builds upon the research collaboration the two companies entered in to in May 2020 that involved pre-clinical evaluation of Soteria® and Phloral® technologies utilising Elasmogen’s multi-valent, novel inflammatory cytokine binding soloMER™ protein therapeutics. Acceleration of this research and development effort is facilitated by a recent £8M funding round announced by Elasmogen and a £1.5M Innovate Future Leaders grant. This grant funding in particular is specifically focused on Elasmogen’s auto-immune programs.
Under the terms of the agreement, Intract will receive an undisclosed upfront payment followed by development milestone payments and royalties on product sales. Elasmogen will have the option to expand the license agreement for up to four additional targets.
‘’We are excited to build on our ongoing partnership with Elasmogen to create new transformative delivery options for innovative protein medicines to meet the unmet needs of millions of patients suffering from chronic inflammatory bowel disease,’’ said Vipul Yadav, CEO at Intract Pharma. ‘’We believe oral targeted protein medicines are the future of IBD therapies and our collaboration with Elasmogen keeps building on our mission to bring innovative oral biologic therapies to patients.’’
“Securing this agreement with Intract enables us to deliver our incredibly potent anti-inflammatory soloMERs directly where they are needed in the GI tract, minimizing off-site adverse effects and maximizing clinical outcomes” said Caroline Barelle, CEO of Elasmogen. “We are really looking forward to working with the Intract team to expand our growing, differentiated pipeline of therapeutic biologics”.
About Intract Pharma
Intract Pharma is biopharmaceutical company bringing disruptive oral biologics delivery solutions to significantly improve the efficacy and safety of emerging and established biotherapeutics and improve patient experience and outcome. The platform leverages the advantage of delivering large proteins/antibodies to the colon, while also protecting the biologics from enzymatic breakdown allowing tissue/systemic uptake to create next generation oral biologic medicines. For more information visit us at www.intractpharma.com.
About Elasmogen
Elasmogen is a privately held biopharmaceutical company located in the thriving biologics cluster in Aberdeen, Scotland. The company is rapidly progressing a pipeline of next-generation soloMER products for the treatment solid-tumour cancers, systemic inflammatory diseases and inflammatory conditions of the gut. The company’s proprietary technology is protected by a robust and layered IP portfolio covering the generation, humanization, half-life extension, products and product formats.
Intract Media Contact
Dr Vipul Yadav
CEO
Elasmogen Media Contact
Dr Caroline Barelle
CEO
Intract Pharma will be speaking at this year’s Antibody Engineering and Therapeutics Conference in Sand Diego, CA. The event – held annually – will be hosted at the Manchester Grand Hyatt Hotel, and features both industrial and academic delegates, includes a broad range of presentations, workshops and panel sessions.
Our session: Soteria®: Revolutionizing Oral Delivery of Antibodies will be presented by Vipul Yadav, PhD, Director of Product Development at Intract Pharma. The presentation touches on the challenges of delivering biologics orally – including monoclonal antibodies – and how Intract has developed Soteria® to overcome these difficulties.
If you would like to attend this session you can book here or contact us at [email protected] for more information.
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Intract Pharma’s Soteria® technology was recently profiled on Europe’s leading biotech news website, Labiotech.eu. The article comments on the potential benefit of the Soteria® technology, highlighting that oral versions of existing antibody therapies “could make the treatments easier for patients and increase compliance.” Also discussed is the £1.4m grant awarded to Intract by Innovate UK to develop a scalable manufacturing process for an oral antibody product using Soteria®.
With over 100,000 monthly visitors to the website, Labiotech.eu covers the medical, industrial and food biotech sectors over a range of different platforms.
You can find the article here:
https://labiotech.eu/medical/intract-pharma-oral-immunotherapy/
You can also find Intract on Labiotech’s map of European Biotech companies here:
An independent review published by Pharmaceutical Technology has listed Intract Pharma’s Phloral® technology among top 4 approaches to oral drug delivery which offer more patient-centric drug delivery for improved patient outcomes.
The review recognizes that the radical improvement in targeting of medications to the colon achieved by Phloral® offers direct benefit to patients by ensuring that medicines consistently reach the appropriate site of action irrespective of gastrointestinal pH variation or transit times as may be exhibited in patients with gastrointestinal illness.
The review discusses three additional earlier-stage technologies from both commercial companies and academia and which are set to revolutionize drug delivery in their fields.
Click here to read the article.
Article
Intract Pharma has now taken up residence at the London Bioscience Innovation Centre (LBIC), based in Camden, London. The new lab and office, at a combined size of 1500sq ft. will allow Intract to continue to grow and flourish in our own dedicated space.
LBIC is an incubator space attached to the Royal Veterinary College and is home to over 60 biotech and life sciences companies – ranging from Multinational Pharmaceutical companies to SMEs and service providers. LBIC is located in the heart of London and is only a short walk from Kings Cross St. Pancras, Camden Town, The Crick Institute, Euston Station and of course, the UCL School of Pharmacy – where it all started.
If you would like to visit us at our new location, please contact Dan Caplin ([email protected]) for more information.
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Intract Founder and CSO Professor Abdul Basit was recently part of a group that was awarded an Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration (IRC) grant by EPSRC worth over £10m. The collaboration, led by Cambridge University and involving UCL, Imperial, Birmingham and Glasgow Universities aims to develop an array of new technologies to improve survival rates for hard-to-treat cancers. Professor George Malliaras, who leads the IRC, said “Some cancers are difficult to remove by surgery and highly invasive, and they are also hard to treat because drugs often cannot reach them at high enough concentration”. In particular, he said, “Pancreatic tumour cells are protected by dense stromal tissue, and tumours of the central nervous system by the blood-brain barrier”. The team hopes to assess and develop a range of new technologies to deliver drugs in high enough concentrations to kill cancer cells. Cancer scientists and clinicians from the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Centre and partner sites will carry out clinical trials. The UCL team will focus on manufacturing technologies to ensure the novel devices are able to be manufactured and robust enough to withstand surgical manipulation. Prof Simon Gaisford said “Our expertise and world-leading experience in designing and manufacturing pharmaceutical products with 3D printing means we are ideally equipped to scale-up and manufacture the exciting drug delivery technologies that will be developed by our project partners”. Prof Basit added “We are very excited to be able to work on such an innovative and exciting project and we look forward to taking 3D printed medicines into the clinic to improve patient outcomes”.
Our CEO, Bill Lindsay, was recently interviewed by Anju Ghangurde from Scrip Intelligence (Informa plc)
This tied in with a stimulating panel discussion on External Innovation at BioAsia 2018 in Hyderabad
Learn what Bill had to say about the future of microbiome-based therapies, oral delivery of biologics and more!
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