New Life and CureLab id anti-fungal compound
compound that represents a significant breakthrough as part of a
joint collaboration, which has demonstrated immunostimulating and
antibacterial properties.
The claimed anti-infective activities have interferon inducer properties as well as antibacterial activity for Chlamydia and Mycobacterium tuberculosis.
Of greatest interest to the two companies are the antiviral properties for infections associated with decreased immunologic response and those responding to interferon treatment.
Other potential uses will also be considered.
"New Life Scientific looks forward to the opportunities CureLab presents and stands ready to assist CureLab in moving their inventions into the clinical stage of development," said Wieslaw Bochenek, president of New Life Scientific.
The new chemical entity, 2,4,Dioxo-5-arylidenimino-1,3-pyrimidines, is protected by US patent (6,730,787), and is designated mainly for use as antiviral, immune stimulating, antichlamydial, antituberculous, psychodepressant, analgesic, and hepatoprotective remedies.
The collaboration aims to focus wholly on anti-infectives and sees them enter a market, worth approximately $25 billion (20.9 billion) with the expectation to grow to $32 billion worldwide by 2010.
Of this, drugs such as Vancomycin, Linezolid and other such anti-infectives used in treating resistant strains of bacteria constitute nearly $1 billion.
The unmet need for effective antibacterial drugs has arisen from the rapid proliferation of bacterial pathogens resistant to the current repertoire of antibiotics, most of which are directed against a limited set of targets.
This is connected with lack of efficiency of the current drugs as well as high rate of variability of microorganisms that leads to origination of resistant forms.
Viral diseases often take a course on the background of lowering activity of the immune system, and they are followed by secondary infections; the same is also true for oncologic diseases.
Therefore the problem of the development of effective antiviral or antitumoral drugs is closely related with the searching for remedies intended for treating the immune-deficient states of various origination.
Existing antiviral drugs may be conventionally divided into two groups according to types of mechanisms of their action.
An action of the drugs of the first group involves suppression of virus reproduction in a body.
Antiviral drugs of the second group produce their effect though stimulating the body's immune protection and increase of producing endogenic interferons to a greater extent rather than affecting the viruses in themselves.
Interferons and their inducers are also used for treatment of a various tumoral diseases.
