Herantis Pharma - New data presented at virtual R&D day
Herantis hosted a virtual R&D today Internal/external speakers on PD & CDNF/xCDNF New deeper look at xCDNF pre-clinical data the stand-out R&D day with internal and external speakers Herantis hosted a virtual R&D day today with the Herantis team of CEO Craig Cook, CSO Henri Huttunen, and CMO Magnus Sjögren dissecting the pre-clinical and clinical data of xCDNF and CDNF. They were joined by a number of external experts and speakers delivering presentations on Parkinson’s disease as a whole, from a global health, patient, and innovation perspective. A first look at new xCDNF data Prof. Bloem spoke about the global burden of Parkinson’s disease, highlighting that unlike Alzheimer’s disease and stroke where the age-standardised rates are stable or in decline, respectively, the prevalence of Parkinson’s disease continues to rise, with environmental exposures to pollutants and pesticides thought to play a role.
Prof. Widner provided an overview of PD culminating with a look at potential novel treatments including CDNF and its multimodal mechanism-of-action for correcting proteostasis and neuroinflammation. Interspersed with previously presented pre-clinical data for xCDNF showing its ability to penetrate the blood-brain barrier when given subcutaneously was new data on its binding to and interaction with key UPR target proteins (regulators of cellular stress).
The highlight was comparative pre-clinical data between xCDNF and CDNF demonstrating that the chemical re-engineering and lead optimisation of HER-096 to give it more drug-like properties has seemingly not compromised its efficacy in a simple neuroprotection assay. Encouragingly for a systemically delivered drug HER-096 showed high potency, greater than CDNF in that model. Main takeaways Our main takeaways are the continued and growing unmet medical need in PD, the promise that xCDNF has shown in pre-clinical studies, and the potential for CDNF to expand the efficacy signals seen in its first-in-hum.