Graft Polymer (UK) PLC CEO Anthony Tennyson takes Proactive's Stephen Gunnion through the progress the company has made in its commercial collaboration with Awakn Life Sciences.
Proactive: I'm joined by Anthony Tennyson, the CEO of Graft Polymer UK. Anthony, good to speak with you again. You’ve announced substantial progress in your collaboration with Awakn Life Sciences. Could you refresh us on that collaboration and what it's targeting?
Anthony Tennyson: So, the purpose of our collaboration with Awakn Life Sciences is to develop a new class of medicines to potentially treat trauma-related mental health disorders, such as PTSD. Unfortunately, these are large, growing, and mostly unsuccessfully treated public health challenges. PTSD, for example, affects 13 million Americans and 20 million people when you include the UK and key European Union markets.
Proactive: Take us through the progress you've made since you announced the collaboration back in July, Anthony.
Anthony Tennyson: Since July, we've made significant and rapid progress in this commercial collaboration. We've identified two series of compounds as the co-leads for this programme, which we believe show the best promise in the development of a new class of treatments for those trauma-related mental health disorders, which are currently poorly treated.
Awakn’s medicinal chemistry team has successfully developed the pathways to synthesize those compounds. We've selected a leading UK company, Charnwood Discovery, to synthesize these two lead compounds that we believe show the most promise at this early stage. Additionally, Awakn’s medicinal chemistry team has identified a further series of new compounds, or molecules if you will. They have recently filed a patent with the US Patent Office, which we believe further protects the intellectual property position for this program and adds value to our commercial collaboration.
Proactive: What are the next steps in the collaboration, Anthony?
Anthony Tennyson: For us, it's to continue the preclinical program as rapidly as possible. That means proceeding to in vitro analysis, and if that stage is successful, moving forward to in vivo studies, ideally enabling us to generate the data to move as rapidly as possible to the clinic, or for your audience, to move into human studies as rapidly but as safely as possible.