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news.Pharmaleads, a pharmaceutical company focusing on research and early development of small molecules, has obtained authorization from the French Medicine Agency to perform a single ascending dose Phase I study with PL37, its lead compound for oral treatment of neuropathic pain.
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This compound originates from the work of Pharmaleads’s chief scientists, Bernard Roques and Marie-Claude Fournie-Zaluski, and is a dual inhibitor of both enzymes responsible for the rapid degradation of enkephalins, the endogenous opiates. It therefore elicits an analgesic effect wherever enkephalins are produced as a response to a painful stimulus, and maintains a high level of these natural analgesic substances by preventing their rapid degradation, the company said.
The preclinical program was financed with the support of Oseo, the French public research financing institution.
Thierry Bourbie, chairman and CEO of Pharmaleads, said: “PL37 is Pharmaleads’s first compound to enter clinical development and the first representative of a totally new class of painkillers, hence confirming the validity of our science and chemistry, as well as our capabilities as a drug development company.”