Metabasis expands Hep C collaboration with Merck & Co
Metabasis Therapeutics, of San Diego, CA, US, has extended and expanded a hepatitis C collaboration that was established with Merck & Co in December 2003.
Metabasis Therapeutics, of San Diego, CA, US, has extended and expanded a hepatitis C collaboration that was established with Merck & Co in December 2003.
The companies will continue their joint efforts to identify novel small molecule therapeutics for the treatment of hepatitis C virus infections (HCV) for an additional twelve months, through December 2005.
Under the extension Merck will continue to contribute drug candidates to the collaboration and fund Metabasis' efforts to apply its technologies to those candidates with the goal of producing a candidate suitable for clinical development. The agreement was expanded to provide for use of certain other technologies in addition to Metabasis' proprietary HepDirect technology.
Metabasis has developed expertise and technology for improving drugs that act primarily in the liver. One example is the company's proprietary HepDirect technology, a prodrug technology that specifically targets production of the biologically active form of certain drugs to the liver. Preclinical studies have shown that use of the HepDirect technology may result in higher active drug concentrations in the liver and decreased exposure to non-liver tissue. Accordingly, HepDirect prodrugs may have the potential to improve efficacy, reduce toxicity and thus improve the treatment of liver and liver-related diseases. Metabasis' HepDirect product candidate for the treatment of Hepatitis B is currently in Phase II clinical development.
'We view Merck's decision to extend the collaboration as a further validation of our technologies, our team and the exciting progress made to date in this program,' said Dr Mark Erion, Metabasis' executive vice president of research and development. 'We look forward to building on that progress during the second year of the collaboration and are optimistic that together we may successfully discover potential new treatments for HCV.'
It is estimated that up to 3% of the world population has been infected with HCV, according to NHANES III (Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey), which means there are more than 170m chronic carriers at risk of developing liver cirrhosis and/or liver cancer. Nearly 4m Americans are infected with HCV and about 2.7m Americans (70%) of those are chronically infected with HCV. In 2002 the NIH issued a report that conservatively estimated that HCV is responsible for 10,000 to 12,000 annual deaths in the US, where the number of people diagnosed with chronic HCV is expected to increase fourfold from 1990 to 2015.