Friday, July 30, 2021
Melior Pharmaceuticals (Melior) announced that it completed a definitive licensing agreement with Adhera Therapeutics, Inc . 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.
