AZTherapies, a Massachusetts General Hospital spinout testing combinations of reformulated drugs to treat Alzheimer’s, is in the midst of a $20 million financing round, according to an SEC filing.
The company is developing a small molecule approach to block the triggers of dementia – stopping the formation of amyloid-beta oligomers and amyloid plaques. The company’s both repurposing existing FDA-approved drugs to be used for Alzheimer’s, and it’s building a pipeline in-house to block the formation of these plaques.
The company, launched in Israel in 2011 but now located in Boston, kicked off an interesting Phase 3 trial this September for early onset Alzheimer’s. Its combination treatment, called ALZT-OP1, works on two different mechanisms that go awry in Alzheimer’s. The first drug inhibits beta-amyloid peptide polymerization and lowers cytokine production, and the second inhibits the neuroinflammatory response.
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“Confronting two triggering causes associated with Alzheimer’s disease progression simultaneously provides a new multifunctional treatment approach for modifying disease progression,” said Dr. David Elmaleh, the company’s founder and director of contrast media chemistry at Mass General.
“The use of these two safe, small molecules designed to modify disease behavior by intervening in the plaque formation process and by changing the course of the propagated neuron-inflammatory response is very promising venue for halting or continuously inhibiting disease progression in the early stages of AD onset,” Dr. Rudy Tanzi, a leading Alzheimer’s disease expert at Mass General, said in a statement.
[Image courtesy of AZTherapies]