EXTON, Pa.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Melior Pharmaceuticals (Melior) announced that it completed a definitive licensing agreement with Adhera Therapeutics, Inc . (OTCPK: ATRX; Adhera) for Melior’s Parkinson’s disease (PD) candidate, MLR-1019 (armesocarb).
As with all of Melior’s drug candidates, MLR-1019 is a repositioned drug that has demonstrated safety and tolerability in previous clinical studies.
Melior has uncovered a previously unreported therapeutic potential of MLR-1019 in PD. As such it represents a new class of PD therapeutic which may be the only drug candidate to address both movement and non-movement aspects of PD. Based upon Melior’s thorough understanding of the drug’s mechanism, an accumulation of a substantial amount of PD animal model data, as well as anecdotes from previous clinical use of the drug, Melior has built confidence in the drug’s utility in benefiting multiple aspects of PD.
Under the terms of the license Adhera is underwriting the cost of further MLR-1019 development. Further, upon attaining certain milestones, Adhera will have an option to fully acquire all intellectual property associated with MLR-1019.
“We are impressed at the unique potential product profile that armesocarb exhibits and have great hopes for its impact on the Parkinson’s disease community”, said Andrew Kucharchuk, CEO of Adhera Therapeutics.
“Adhera has proven to be an agile partner whom we have full confidence with towards progressing the clinical development of armesocarb in Parkinson’s clinical studies” said Andrew Reaume, CEO of Melior Pharmaceuticals.
About Melior
Melior Discovery and its sister companies, Melior Pharmaceuticals I, Inc. and Melior Pharmaceuticals II, LLC, are leaders in pharmaceutical drug repositioning using the unique theraTRACE® platform comprised of multiplexed in vivo disease models. Melior is using these capabilities to build an internal pipeline of development candidates and also partners with pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical companies to apply the theraTRACE® platform and its in-depth in vivo pharmacology expertise to their development candidates. Melior Discovery and Melior Pharmaceuticals are privately held and located in Exton, PA. For more information, visit www.meliordiscovery.com and www.meliorpharma.com.
About Adhera Therapeutics
Adhera Therapeutics is a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company focused on identifying advanced drug candidates that may qualify for accelerated developmental pathways. Adhera’s legacy assets include CEQ508, an oral delivery of small interfering RNA (siRNA) against beta-catenin, to suppress polyps in the precancerous syndrome and orphan indication Familial Adenomatous Polyposis (FAP). In addition to MLR-1019 (armesocarb) the Company is actively exploring additional pipeline additions
