ProtAffin awarded €2.7M for development of respiratory drug

ProtAffin AG has announced the award of public funding of €2.7 million for the preclinical development of its lead anti-inflammatory product PA401 in respiratory disease, including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

The grant was awarded by the Austrian Forschungs-Förderungs-Gesellschaft (FFG), the leading public funding body in Austria for translational research. The overall size of the PA401 research program is €3.6 million and ProtAffin will receive a grant from FFG of €2.7 million.

Andreas Kungl, Chief Scientific Officer of ProtAffin, said the award of this very significant grant by FFG is a tremendous help to ProtAffin in bringing PA401 through preclinical development. “We look forward to working with FFG on the preclinical development of PA401 and we plan to bring PA401 into Phase I clinical development in early 2012.”

ProtAffin is a preclinical stage biotechnology company located in Graz, Austria and Oxford, UK, developing biopharmaceuticals in inflammation and oncology. Its novel class of biopharmaceuticals target heparin-like glycans, which are complex sugars that drive inflammatory as well as angiogenic and metastatic processes.

ProtAffin has used its proprietary CellJammer discovery technology to develop a pipeline of preclinical development candidates based on engineered human chemokine proteins.

PA401 is a modified form of the human chemokine IL-8, which is produced by endothelial cells, macrophages and other cells. Its primary function is the induction of neutrophil chemotaxis. PA401 acts as a potent, targeted anti-inflammatory protein preventing the infiltration of neutrophils, which is a hallmark of many acute and chronic respiratory diseases, including COPD.

By binding to glycans that drive the infiltration of neutrophils in inflammation with a higher affinity than wild-type IL-8, PA401 prevents wild-type IL-8 from activating neutrophils and thus inhibits the events that would normally lead to chronic lung inflammation.