REDWOOD CITY, CA – November 2, 2020 – Ashvattha Therapeutics, a clinical-stage biotech company focused on the development of novel hydroxyl dendrimer therapeutics (HDTs) to treat unmet medical needs in oncology, ocular and inflammatory diseases, today announced data from a late-breaking presentation at The Liver Meeting Digital Experience 2020 of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (AASLD), held virtually November 13-16, 2020.
Details for the virtual poster presentation are as follows:
- Presentation Title: Hepatocyte targeted therapy to enhance efficacy and safety of drugs for liver diseases
- Presentation Date & Time: Friday, November 13, 2020, 6 AM – 11:55 PM EDT
- Presentation Room: 2066
- Presenters: Jeffrey Cleland, Ph.D., et al.
Hepatocytes are involved in many liver disorders, including nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), but current therapeutics are not selective for hepatocytes, resulting in a lack of efficacy or off-target toxicity. Ashvattha has developed a novel hepatocyte targeted hydroxyl dendrimer (htHD) therapeutic which enables selective targeting of farnesoid X receptor agonists (FXRa) on hepatocytes through the asialoglycoprotein receptor (ASGP-R) mediated uptake after systemic administration, thereby enhancing the drug efficacy and reducing the dose and off-site toxicity.
In this preclinical study, systemically administered htHDs localized to hepatocytes, bound to the ASGP-R, and were slowly internalized and transported to the nucleus. FXRa alone had little or no effect on measures of reducing NASH, while the htHD-FXRa had a significant effect on reductions in liver enzymes as well as NAFLD, stenosis, and fibrosis scores. Ashvattha’s targeted HDT approach has the potential to significantly reduce systemic off-target toxicity and improve efficacy of FXRa compounds. Future studies will evaluate the potential for htHD-FXRa therapy as infrequently as once per month and investigate oral administration. Based on these encouraging results, the htHD approach provides a platform for developing a wide range of drugs to treat liver diseases.
“We have previously demonstrated the ability to utilize HDs to target reactive inflammatory cells without a targeting ligand. In our presentation at the Liver Meeting 2020, we describe novel HDs further tuned to target specific tissues to enhance the efficacy and safety of drugs,” said Jeffrey Cleland, Ph.D., Chairman, CEO & President at Ashvattha Therapeutics. “These data represent further expansion of our HDT platform into targeted liver treatments, and we look forward to utilizing these findings to develop htHD therapeutics to treat liver diseases such as NASH and hepatocellular carcinoma.”
For more information, abstracts are available online at www.aasld.org.
About Ashvattha Therapeutics
Ashvattha Therapeutics, a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company, is developing novel therapeutics that target and alter specific cells in areas of diseased tissues. The Company’s targeted platform technology, hydroxyl dendrimers (HD), is exclusively licensed from Johns Hopkins University. HDs chemically conjugated to disease modifying drugs create novel proprietary HD therapeutics (HDTs). Ashvattha has initiated multiple programs with HDTs focused on oncology, age-related macular degeneration (AMD), hyperinflammation in diseases such as COVID-19 and neuroinflammatory diseases such as Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and Alzheimer’s disease. For more information, visit: www.avttx.com