Motif Bio Plc (LON:MTFB) Chief Executive Officer Dr Graham Lumsden caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss the first patient dosed in the Iclaprim Phase III trials
Q1: Now this morning we saw news that your first patient has been dosed in the Iclaprim Phase III trials to treat skin infections, what does this mean for patients?
A1: Well I think this is really good news for patients, we continue to read almost on a weekly basis of these horror stories of patients in hospital with these so-called super bugs causing skin infections that are becoming more and more difficult to treat because the antibiotics today are just not working anymore. So Iclaprim being a new mechanism that works in a very different way to anything else in development is really good news that we’ve been able to get our Phase III trials started and we think it’s a big deal that we’ve been able to announce that the first patient has been dosed because that keeps us on track to be able to complete the trials second half of 2017 and hopefully make available Iclaprim for patients in hospital with serious skin infections from 2018 onwards.
Q2: What does this mean for investors then?
A2: Well I think this is really important from an investor prospective because this shows that the team at Motif Bio has been able to execute and deliver results. So if we just go back to April of 2015, Motif just listed on AIM on April 2nd 2015 and it was at that point that we closed the transaction to acquire Iclaprim so in last than 12 months the team has been able to have very productive conversations and meetings with the FDA in the United States and the Medicines Evaluations Board in the Netherlands, get agreement in both cases with our plans to take Iclaprim to Phase III and then get the agreement with the final protocols and the dose. Then we were able to partner with Covance as our clinical research organisation, get all the clinical trial sites lined up and then finally being able to manufacture the clinical trials supply so I’m extremely proud of the team at Motif who have been able to accomplish this, it’s very very complicated and difficult to get all of these things done, far less in less than 12 months. So I think what that means to investors is that we’ve demonstrated that we have an excellent team and that we can actually execute and deliver on the results that we need to get Iclaprim successfully approved and on the market to commercialisation.
