StemCell Therapy

A new treatment for blindness caused by diabetes is on the way, with Bicycle Therapeutics at Babraham announcing a milestone achievement.

The new treatment, for diabetic macular edema, is being devised in partnership with Belgian company ThromboGenics, which is focused on developing treatments for back of the eye disease.

Bicycles are a new class of small molecule medicines designed to overcome many of the limitations of

existing drugs.

Under the terms of the alliance, ThromboGenics has an exclusive license to undertake pre-clinical and clinical development and subsequent commercialization of a specified drug candidate; in return Bicycle receives development milestone payments and royalties on sales of products resulting from the collaboration.

Were delighted to be realizing our first candidate milestone from a Bicycle alliance and to be

advancing another Bicycle towards the clinic for the treatment of a significant disease, in this case DME, said Dr Kevin Lee, Bicycle chief executive. This achievement confirms the potential for Bicycles to be developed to address a broad range of poorly treated diseases.

We are continuing to expand our pipeline through research collaborations which will extend our reach into new therapeutic areas and allow us to explore new applications for the Bicycle platform.

This is an exciting moment in our partnership with Bicycle Therapeutics, said Dr Patrik De Haes, chief Executive of ThromboGenics NV. We believe that THR-149, a novel plasma kallikrein inhibitor, holds great promise for ophthalmology applications, expanding the range of treatment options available for people with diseases of the eye, particularly DME. We are rapidly moving towards the

clinic, and expect to begin clinical development early in 2018.

Bicycle Therapeutics is developing a new class of medicines to treat cancer and other important

diseases based on its bicyclic peptide product platform.

Bicycles are like antibodies. Their small size enables rapid and deep tissue penetration, allowing tissues and tumours to be targeted from within. Their peptidic nature provides a tuneable pharmacokinetic half-life and a renal route of clearance, thus avoiding the liver and gastrointestinal tract toxicity often seen with other drugs.

The company says it is rapidly advancing towards the clinic with its lead programmes which selectively deliver toxins to tumours. Its unique intellectual property is based on the work initiated at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge by the scientific founders of the company, Sir Gregory Winter and Professor Christian Heinis.

Read more:
New treatment for blindness - Cambridge News

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