Peter Parker, president and CEO of Cequent, said: “When we started the Novartis program, we were evaluating eight targets simultaneously as potential therapeutics for inflammatory bowel disease. Our milestone goal, which we accomplished, was to winnow the targets down to three that we will further validate in in vivo animal trials before Cequent selects the single target to be the subject of the option agreement.
“We believe our success with this work, along with progress in our other development programs for familial polyposis and human papilloma virus, demonstrate the potential of our TransKingdom RNA interference technology to become an important tool to better understand, and ultimately, to treat many devastating diseases.”