ProMIS Initiates Manufacturing of Lead Antibody to Treat Alzheimer’s Disease

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) affects around 35 million people worldwide and still there is no treatment to slow or stop the disease, according to the World Health Organization. This is why companies who are making headway on AD treatments are ones for investors to watch.

On Tuesday (June 12), ProMis Neurosciences (TSX:PMN) announced it has started manufacturing its lead therapeutic antibody to treat AD, PMN310. The clinical trial is on track to start in the second half of 2019.

This candidate is a humanized antibody which binds high affinity and selectivity for the toxic oligomers of amyloid beta, a recognized root cause of AD.

“We recently completed successful affinity maturation of PMN310, which in addition to its unique and highly selective binding profile offers increased opportunity for best in class therapy for Alzheimer’s disease,” Dr. Elliot Goldstein, ProMIS president and CEO said in the press release.

The private-Swiss-based life science company will carry out the first step to manufacturing the antibody therapeutics using its proprietary Selexis SUREtechnology platform. The platform facilitates rapid, stable and cost-effective production of close to any recombinant protein including ones open that are difficult to express in other systems.

Yemi Onakunle, Selexis vice president of business development and licensing shared similar sentiments about the manufacturing deal. The company is a global leader in mammalian (suspension-adapted CHO-K1) cell line generation which offers proprietary technology for life-saving treatments and has over 100 worldwide partners and drug products in clinical development.

ProMIS is a developmental stage biotechnology company working on precision therapies for treat neurodegenerative diseases, such as AD, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease. ProMIS uses its target discovery engine, applying thermodynamic, computational discovery platform to predict novel targets called Disease Specific Epitopes on the molecular surface of misfolded proteins.

Investor takeaway

Throughout Tuesday’s trading period following the announcement, ProMIS share price increased 8.70 percent to $0.38.

In the last few months, shares of the company have increased significantly, most notably by 227.27 percent between January 17 to 29, 2018. During that time the company released a statement to confirm it hadn’t released any undisclosed information after a request from the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada.

Since then the share price has made a gradual decrease but is still higher than what it was prior to the spike in mid-January.

With ProMIS on track to begin its clinical trial in the second half of 2019, investors interested can look forward to hearing more about the company’s other product candidates including PMN350, and PMN 330, which are also for AD.

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Securities Disclosure: I, Gabrielle Lakusta, hold no direct investment interest in any company mentioned in this article.