N4 Pharma Plc (LON:N4P), the specialist pharmaceutical company developing Nuvec®, a novel delivery system for vaccines and cancer treatments, has announced its unaudited interim results for the six months ended 30 June 2021.
Highlights:
· Continued strategy to focus on three work streams: optimisation; in vivo studies; and other applications
· Key focus on establishing collaborations with a view to securing future commercial agreements, resulting in two Material Transfer Agreements to assess how well Nuvec® can bind and be optimised for transfection with each respective party’s proprietary plasmid:
o the first of which operates in the gene therapy space
o the second is a pharmaceutical company developing its own proprietary vaccine for Covid-19 using a DNA plasmid
· Continued work with Nanomerics on the use of Nuvec® in respect of the delivery of TNFalpha in the treatment of cancer, the initial pilot study to assess the tolerance of different doses has been successful
· Pilot studies indicated that a lower dose of 10ug pOVA bound to optimised, monodispersed Nuvec® gave a better result than a 50ug dose of the original, agglomerated Nuvec® used in previous studies
· Notifications of intention to grant patents from the European, Australian, and Japanese patent offices
o Further strengthening the IP position around Nuvec® with the European Patent Office intention to grant a divisional patent in respect of composition
· Contracted through Medicines Discovery Catapult (“Catapult”) a full-time Postdoctoral Researcher
· Operating loss for the period was £970,628 (30 June 2020: £585,066)
· Cash balance at period end of approximately £2.54 million
Nigel Theobald, Chief Executive Officer of N4 Pharma Plc, commented:
“The first six months of the year has seen an acceleration in our understanding of the capabilities of Nuvec® following our optimisation work. This has been coupled with our first MTAs which, in turn and together with results elsewhere, led us to review the scope of the recently commenced in vivo work with Evotec pushing some of this work into the second half of this financial year.
“Our strategy remains the same as it always has and that is to generate sufficient proof of concept data with a view to attracting large pharma and biotech partners to enter into collaborations to explore using Nuvec® as their chosen delivery system. The issues facing mRNA Covid vaccines in respect of storage and distribution are well known following the Coronavirus pandemic. DNA vaccines are more stable than mRNA yet need to use a much higher dose due to the delivery systems currently chosen. Demonstrating suitable efficacy whilst addressing the storage and dosage issues would, we believe, greatly enhance Nuvec® as a potential delivery tool for vaccines in the eyes of collaborators.
“With the short-term work programmes likely to provide plenty of data points over the next three to six months coupled with the ongoing MTA work we remain cautiously optimistic as we seek to commercialise Nuvec®. We continue to be well funded for all existing work streams and look forward to analysing the results of studies and sharing them with interested parties when they become available.”
