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news.US biopharmaceutical company Novelos Therapeutics has revealed that its lead drug candidate has been accepted into a "dirty bomb" program being run by the National Institutes of Health.
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NOV-002, which is currently in trials for oncology indications, will be part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ (NIAID) program for developing drugs to treat injuries caused by exposure to radiation.
The aim of this initiative is to facilitate the development of products that could prevent or treat radiation injury. Novelos said that it expects the NIAID to begin testing NOV-002 animal efficacy later in 2007.
In addition, the company revealed that preliminary results in ongoing animal models of acute radiation injury being conducted at the Shriners Hospitals for Children in Boston had been encouraging.
The company said that when NOV-002 was administered to mice that had been exposed to lethal doses of radiation, the animals tended to increase survival and reduce morbidity compared to mice treated with a placebo.
This supported results of earlier non-clinical trials conducted by the Russian Ministry of Defense, which showed that mice and rats that had been exposed to lethal levels of radiation and were then treated with NOV-002 showed a two to three-fold increase in 30-day survival compared to the irradiated but untreated control animals.
“We are very pleased that NIAID has accepted NOV-002 into its radiation injury drug development program, as well as seeing initial validation of the positive Russian findings at Shriners,” said Harry Palmin, president and CEO of Novelos.