Faron Pharmaceuticals Ltd (LON:FARN) said it has filed a clinical trial application for Clevegen, its precision cancer immunotherapy.
It paves the way for a Phase I/II study, called MATINS, that will assess the safety and efficacy of the drug candidate.
READ: Making sense of Faron's news flow
Clevegen will be used to treat cutaneous melanoma as well as hepatobiliary/hepatocellular, pancreatic, ovarian and colorectal cancers.
The treatment is an anti-Clever-1 antibody which causes changes in the immune environment of solid tumours by switching Clever-1 positive immune suppressive macrophages to immune active macrophages.
Put more simply and omitting the jargon, tumour cells are adept at creating a shield around themselves to evade detection by the immune system, therefore staving off destruction.
Clevegen has been designed to recognise cancer and break the cell’s protective shell. Ultimately, if it is successful, this new breed of treatment will be used in combination with PD-1 inhibitors to tackle the killer disease.
Faron chief executive Dr Markku Jalkanen said: "We are making rapid progress with our Clevegen programme and this clinical trial filing is an important milestone.
“This precision therapy for cancers with very few treatment options has a unique mechanism of action which, coupled with promising pre-clinical data and human ex-vivo data, already indicates the product's potential in a broad range of indications.”
The shares rose 2% to 101p.
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