Aphios
Corporation Executes Material Transfer Agreement with National
Cancer Institute, NIH for Natural Products to Discover and
Develop Novel Anticancer and Antiviral Therapeutics
March
16, 2004 - Aphios Corporation
has executed a Material Transfer Agreement with the National
Cancer Institute (NCI), National Institutes of Health (NIH)
to access its natural products repository of terrestrial
plants and marine organisms.
“Over
the last three decades (1981-2002) and covering all diseases,
countries and sources, 52% of the 1,031 new chemical entities
(NCEs), 60% of anticancer drugs and 71% of anti-infectives
approved by regulatory authorities were based on natural
products isolated from terrestrial plants and microorganisms.”
Dr. David Newman, NCI.
Despite
these statistics, many pharmaceutical companies have eliminated
or significantly downsized their natural products research
over the last two decades. This shift was made to explore
the promise of high-throughput screening of mass-produced
combinatorial libraries against the many disease targets
that have been developed as a result of the explosion of
biologic and genetic information, and the sequencing of
the human genome. This paradigm shift has not resulted in
the expected surge in productivity in the discovery pipeline.
In fact, the number of NCEs has hit a 20-year low of 17
in 2002 and is still declining. This decline in productivity
is caused, in part, by the shift from screening natural
products molecules that have been honed by millions of years
of evolutionary development to screening simple organic
structures that can be readily manipulated by combinatorial
chemistry.
In
the last decade, Aphios has addressed some of the critical
issues of natural products drug discovery by developing
and patenting core enabling technologies for the rapid preparation
of partially purified natural product mixtures that minimize
false positives and negatives in sensitive biological screens.
Aphios has also developed and patented core enabling technologies
for the cost-effective manufacturing of rare and complex
natural product molecules. Trevor Castor, CEO, Aphios states
that “While we have several promising anticancer and
antiviral leads in development, access to the world-class
natural products resource of the NCI combined with our drug
discovery and manufacturing technologies will further deepen
our product development pipeline.”
Aphios
Corporation is a biopharmaceutical company that is developing
enhanced natural therapeutics for health maintenance and
the treatment of human diseases with a focus on infectious
diseases, oncology and quality-of-life (QOL) medicines.
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