N4 Pharma Plc (LON:N4P), the specialist pharmaceutical company developing Nuvec®, a novel delivery system for cancer treatments and vaccines, has announced a further update on its recent pre-clinical study with TNF alpha.
On 13 June 2022 the Company provided an update that the Medicines Discovery Catapult study showed clear tumour suppression with 10ug of the TNF-alpha loaded onto Nuvec® which was a lower dose than used in the earlier studies.
Biochemical analysis of blood and tissue samples has now been completed. Testing confirmed that treatment with 10ug TNF-alpha loaded onto Nuvec® resulted in an increase in circulating plasma TNF-alpha levels.
Analysis also indicated that tissues including the liver and the tumour cells may have been responsible for the transfection with the TNF plasmid and subsequent release of TNF-alpha into the circulation to suppress the tumour.
This study provides further data to better understand the mechanism that produced the tumour suppression. This data indicates the most appropriate use of Nuvec® in the oncology field will likely be to combine it with one or more nucleic acids alongside a targeting ligand to allow specific cancer cells to be targeted.
The posters resulting from the original oncology studies undertaken by Nanomerics have been presented at the CRS Annual Meeting in Montreal, Canada and are available to view on the Company’s website.
Nigel Theobald, Chief Executive Officer of N4 Pharma, commented:
“We continue to make good progress in understanding how Nuvec® can be used in the oncology space and this work, combined with the potential opening up of the siRNA market and the early data coming from UQ on their oral work, gives us a lot of material to further focus our route to commercial success.
“We will provide a further update of this along with our interim results.”
