Panacea Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Announces Agreements With Loyola Medical School For Parkinson's Disease Drug Development

ROCKVILLE, Md.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 21, 2000--Panacea Pharmaceuticals, Inc. is pleased to announce that it has signed a License Agreement and a Collaborative Research Agreement with researchers at Loyola Medical School in Maywood, Illinois covering drug discovery efforts for Lewy body disorders, including Parkinson's disease (PD).

The License Agreement grants Panacea exclusive worldwide rights to in vitro assays that have been shown to model Lewy body formation and aggregation in the brain of PD patients.

The discoveries further support the recent discovery of the role of alpha-synuclein (A-Syn) in PD.

Background

The discovery of the A-Syn gene has opened exciting new opportunities to explore the pathophysiology of PD and other Lewy body diseases.

Lewy bodies are neuronal inclusions that are the neuropathologic hallmark of PD. A-Syn is present in Lewy bodies in PD and diffuse Lewy body disease. In addition, mutations in A-Syn cause rare cases of familial PD, which demonstrates that changes in A-Syn biology are sufficient to drive the pathophysiology of PD.

The striking accumulation of A-Syn inclusions in Lewy body diseases indicates that A-Syn also plays an important role in the pathophysiology of these diseases.

Nevertheless, the reason A-Syn aggregates and the role of this aggregation in causing dementia, including that seen in Alzheimer's disease, has been inconclusive.

Panacea's Technology

The group of researchers at Loyola, led by Benjamin Wolozin, M.D., Ph.D., have now discovered that mutations in the A-Syn gene, along with other certain mediating factors, may both cause and expedite the formation of Lewy body inclusions. Our collaborators then used these findings to develop cell-culture and in vitro systems for inducing Lewy body formation and for identifying inhibitors of Lewy body formation.

"Initial non-targeted in vitro drug screening efforts have already shown the inhibition of Lewy body aggregation by as much as 38%," said Dr. Wolozin. "We have now developed an efficient high-throughput drug screening system for the rapid identification of drug candidates for PD."

"Panacea is extremely excited to be working with Dr. Wolozin and his team on these cutting-edge findings," said Hossein A. Ghanbari, Ph.D., President and CEO of Panacea. "The Company already has two pharmacologically active compounds, PAN-408 and PAN-527, that significantly reduce alpha-synuclein aggregation. We are continuing to use the established proprietary in vitro models to screen rational drugs targeted at the mechanism of this aggregation. We believe that our current pre-clinical candidates as well as other compounds we develop have the potential for prophylactic and therapeutic use in the treatment of Parkinson's disease and other Lewy body diseases, which constitute 20% of all dementia cases."

Parkinson's disease is the most common motor disorder, affecting 1% of the population over 60 years of age. Among individuals older than 70 years, 1.5-2.5% have the disease. In the United States alone, 50,000 people are diagnosed with PD each year, and more than half a million are affected at any one time.

With the increasing age of the population and growth of the number of elderly individuals, a substantial increase in PD is anticipated. Current therapeutic approaches are aimed at slowing the progression of the disease or minimizing one of several symptoms. These treatments are highly limited and unsatisfactory.

About Panacea Pharmaceuticals

Panacea Pharmaceuticals, Inc. focuses on developing and utilizing protein-based technologies to detect and identify changes associated with and involved in diseases of the central nervous system such as Alzheimer's disease, brain tumors, transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, and Lewy body diseases such as Parkinson's disease.

Changes in disease-relevant proteins by altered expression, post-translational modification, and functional variation are utilized to develop diagnostic tests and therapeutic agents.

More information is available at www.PanaceaPharma.com, a web site developed by Ei Web Promotion, a subsidiary of eiCommunications.com, Inc. (www.eiCommunications.com), which offers integrated communications and web development solutions for the Information Age.