Noxopharm collaboration leads to grant from mRNA Victoria Acceleration Fund

Biotech News: The Victorian Minister for Innovation, Medical Research and the Digital Economy, the Hon Jaala Pulford MP, has granted A$100,000 from the mRNA Victoria Research Acceleration Fund to Hudson Institute of Medical Research for a study into RNA-based therapeutics.

Australian biotech, Noxopharm’s wholly owned subsidiary, Victoria-registered Pharmorage Pty Ltd, is collaborating with Hudson Institute and the Australian National University on this project to explore TLR7-driven autoimmune disease. Noxopharm will be matching the funding of this grant, making an investment of A$100,000 with a view to progressing promising drug candidates into the company’s drug development program, under the terms of its license agreement with Hudson Institute.

Dr Gisela Mautner, CEO and Managing Director of Noxopharm, said “This grant is the result of exciting work by Hudson Institute of Medical Research together with Noxopharm to develop drugs that have the potential to treat a number of autoimmune diseases, like Lupus, which urgently need better treatment options. We believe that with our ground-breaking new RNA-based technology platform, Sofra^TM, we will make rapid advances in this field.”

Autoimmune and auto-inflammatory disorders affect as many as 5% of Australians, with uncontrolled inflammation contributing to many chronic health issues. The focus of the research funded by this grant is lupus, an autoimmune disease that causes a range of debilitating conditions, severely impacting quality-of-life and life expectancy.

Hudson Institute has developed a novel strategy that utilises short RNA-like molecules (oligonucleotides) to block TLR7 receptors. These receptors are overactivated in SLE. The short oligonucleotides have the ability to block TLR7 activation and subsequent inflammation in vitro. This grant will fund the laboratory work to establish the therapeutic efficacy of these novel oligonucleotide TLR7 inhibitors in several animal models as well as in primary human cells derived from SLE patients.

If this technology is proven, Noxopharm will investigate the development of further oligonucleotide drug candidates with potential indications in other autoimmune diseases.

The project will commence shortly and will run for 12 months. Noxopharm will keep the market informed as the project progresses.