"Speed to the goal of completing business development by the end of the year"
Bridge Biotherapeutics (Bridge Biotherapeutics, Lee Jeong-gyu) is a bio venture company established in September 2015. In 2019, the fourth year of its establishment, it signed two technology transfer contracts and succeeded in entering the KOSDAQ market.
Since then, it has acquired Ellips Diagnostics, an electrochemical-based diagnostic company, and is speeding up global business development.
Bridge Bio, which celebrates its 9th anniversary this year, will focus on the technology transfer business of "Special Lung Fibrosis Treatment (BBT-877).
According to Bridge Bio on the 16th, a face-to-face meeting was held with five major global pharmaceutical companies regarding BBT-877, a candidate for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis treatment, and a meeting is planned with three pharmaceutical companies after securing phase 2 clinical data.
It is speeding up follow-up contacts with the aim of completing business development within the year.
Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis is a rare disease with 700,000 patients, and the demand for unmet medical care reaches 75%. It is a lung disease that gradually hardens and loses its function as collagen fibrous tissue accumulates excessively.
The market size is expected to reach $11.7 billion (about 16 trillion) in 2031, up from $4.1 billion (about 5.6 trillion) in 2022.
BBT-877 is the first new drug candidate in the family that selectively inhibits autotaxin, a new target protein. The results of phase 1 clinical trials showed that it simultaneously inhibits all receptors considered to be biomarkers of autotaxin inhibitors, such as lysophosphatidic acid (LPA)1 and LPA6 receptors.
BBT-877, which is currently in phase 2 global clinical trials in five countries around the world, is taking drugs to more than 90 patients with the aim of recruiting 120 patients.
Since the second independent data monitoring committee (IDMC) inspection conducted earlier this year, clinical trials have been cruising, and no patient has discontinued clinical trials due to adverse events. The third IDMC scheduled to be held in April will further validate drug development competitiveness.
Recently, the results of animal experiments in which BBT-877 and the standard chemotherapy drug "Parklitaxel" were administered together in epithelial ovarian cancer were published in the international journal Anticancer Research.
Epithelial ovarian cancer, which accounts for about 90% of all ovarian cancers, is known to experience recurrence in more than 70% of terminal patients due to drug resistance.
As a result of administering a total of four drugs three days apart to animal models that caused disease by administering ovarian cancer tumor stem cells, it was confirmed that the number of tumor nodules in the BBT-877 and paclitaxel co-administered group decreased by more than 50% compared to paclitaxel alone.
BBT-301, a candidate for the treatment of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, is expected to enter phase 2 clinical trials within this year, and BBT-209 is expected to confirm its development plan, a Bridge Bio official said. "BBT-207, which is being developed as a targeted treatment for fourth-generation lung cancer, plans to prove the effectiveness and safety of the drug through phase 1/2 clinical trials."
[WIKI KOREA=Cho Eun, Reporter]
choeun@wikileaks-kr.org
