Redx Pharma announces nomination of first fibrosis treatment candidate
By Josh White
Date: Wednesday 14 Nov 2018
(Sharecast News) - Drug discovery and development company Redx Pharma announced the nomination of its first development compound to treat fibrosis on Wednesday.
The AIM-traded firm said the new development candidate, RXC006, was an oral porcupine inhibitor that would be developed as a first-in-class treatment for the orphan disease, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), which it described a severe and life-threatening chronic lung condition with very poor prognosis and limited treatment options.
It said RXC006 represented a novel approach to treat the debilitating and progressive disease through targeting porcupine, a component enzyme of the Wnt pathway.
There was reportedly strong scientific evidence that the pathway was critically involved in the scarring process, or fibrosis, in the lung that was a hallmark of IPF.
That apparently lead, over time, to the lungs being unable to function effectively, ultimately resulting in suffocation and death.#
Porcupine inhibition suppressed the release of all Wnt ligands, and therefore should eliminate one of the major drivers of fibrosis in IPF, Redx explained.
The median survival from IPF diagnosis was three years, and the annual incidence was between 6.8 and 16.3 per 100,000 population in the United States.
Redx said extensive preclinical testing had revealed that RXC006 was "very potent" and "highly effective" at suppressing the Wnt pathway, and hence fibrosis, in vivo in the lung as well as in the liver and the kidney.
Evidence apparently showed that involvement of the Wnt pathway increased with disease severity, and Redx said it believed that RXC006 could also prove effective in more severe IPF patients where there was currently no effective therapy beyond palliative care.
"IPF is a devastating disease with little effective treatment and there is, therefore, a clear unmet need for new therapies," said Redx Pharma chief executive officer Lisa Anson.
"Redx is excited to bring its precision medicinal chemistry expertise to bear with the discovery of this novel drug candidate.
"We look forward to taking RXC006 into clinical development; we plan to enter first in man clinical trials during 2020, in line with our strategy."
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