AlzeCure Pharma AB (publ) (FN STO: ALZCUR), a pharmaceutical company that develops a broad portfolio of small molecule drug candidates for diseases affecting the central nervous system, with projects in both Alzheimer’s disease and pain, today announced that the company has chosen a candidate drug (CD) and started the preclinical development phase with the company's preventive and disease-modifying candidate drug Alzstatin® ACD680.
ACD680 is being developed within AlzeCure's Alzstatin platform, with the aim of developing a preventive and disease-modifying drug for the early treatment of Alzheimer's disease. In the project, a CD has now been selected which will continue into the preclinical development program, which includes preclinical safety and tolerability studies, as well as formulation work and stability testing.
In Alzheimer's disease, a protein, amyloid beta (Aβ42), accumulates into larger aggregates, such as plaques, which have a harmful effect on nerve cells and their function. ACD680 is a so-called gamma-secretase modulator (GSM), which constitutes a promising class of small-molecule Aβ42-lowering anti-amyloidogenic substances for preventive and disease-modifying treatment of Alzheimer's disease. The GSM thereby affects the production of the very building block of the harmful amyloid aggregates and exhibits several key properties that distinguish it from antibody treatments, including that it can be taken in tablet form, easily crosses the blood-brain barrier and can be produced more cost-effectively.
”With Alzstatin, we want to offer a preventive and disease-modifying treatment against Alzheimer's in the form of an oral therapy, which is non-invasive for patients. In addition to affecting an important disease mechanism, ACD680 also derives from a new series of molecules that, among other things, are expected to provide benefits from a patent perspective, with a significantly longer patent period,” said Gunnar Nordvall, project leader and Director of Medicinal Chemistry at AlzeCure.
”We are very pleased to have begun preclinical development with ACD680. We hereby build further on the communicated strategy to strengthen the project portfolio with the development of several candidates in parallel and also demonstrate AlzeCure's capacity in terms of development and delivery. With the increased interest in the Alzheimer field, we see exciting commercial opportunities for Alzstatin going forward,” said AlzeCure’s CEO Martin Jönsson.
