Industry News
Lions Eye Institute and PYC Therapeutics Enter Commercial Partnership
Lions Eye Institute (LEI) and PYC Therapeutics have entered into a commercial collaboration agreement to develop drugs for a leading cause of blinding eye disease. The commercial partnership will take the form of a special purpose vehicle, Vision Pharma Pty Ltd, in which LEI and PYC have equity interests based on their contributions of IP and funding.
The Vision Pharma lead program combines PYC’s best-in-class delivery technology with LEIs novel RNA therapies to create a competitively differentiated drug to treat a leading cause of childhood blindness – Retinitis Pigmentosa. Vision Pharma intends to commence Investigational New Drug (IND)-enabling studies for this lead program in the first half of 2020. Successful IND-enabling studies will culminate in approval for testing in humans. This exciting collaboration combines a unique set of world leading technologies originating in Perth, Western Australia.
“The formation of Vision Pharma in WA is the culmination of combining decades of research into splice therapy (led by Sue Fletcher, Co-inventor), cell penetrating peptides (through PYC), data from the Australian Inherited Retinal Diseases Registry (established in the 1980s), and more recently developed local expertise in stem cell retinal disease modelling (LEI)” said Dr Fred K. Chen, co-inventor of the lead drug and head of LEI’s Ocular Tissue Engineering Laboratory. This development will enable a potential drug to be delivered from discovery right through to the clinic, all driven from Perth, WA.
“We look forward to the clinical development of therapeutics for Retinitis Pigmentosa and other degenerative retinal diseases” commented Professor Sue Fletcher, Chief of Research and Development at PYC Therapeutics and global leader in RNA Therapeutics.