CytRx Corporation, a biopharmaceutical research and development company engaged in the development of high-value human therapeutics, has announced that study results demonstrated that arimoclomol exhibited both statistically significant neuroprotective and neuroregenerative effects in brain cells of animals induced with stroke, offering insights into this drug candidate’s mechanism of action.
Orally administered arimoclomol is a molecular chaperone amplifier that is believed to help reduce the accumulation of damaged proteins that may play a role in multiple diseases and disorders. Reportedly, the study was conducted under the direction of stroke expert Michael Chopp of the Department of Neurology in the Henry Ford Health System, Detroit, Michigan and the Department of Physics, Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan.
It has been reported that the results showed that arimoclomol treatment in all groups tended to increase the number of cells expressing HSP70 compared to controls in the zone surrounding the lesion, reaching statistical significance (p<0.05) in those animals initially dosed either six or 10 hours following the stroke event. Importantly, treatment with arimoclomol initiated at all four time points following the stroke event significantly increased the number of newly developing neurons in both the zone surrounding the lesion, as well as in an area called the subventricular zone of the lateral ventricle – the typical origin of these cells prior to their migration to the damaged tissue.
Steven Kriegsman, president and CEO of CytRx, said: “These results help explain how arimoclomol achieved the dramatic improvements in functional recovery that we observed in our previously announced rat stroke studies. This better understanding of arimoclomol’s mechanism of action is an important piece of information that we expect will be valuable in attracting potential pharmaceutical or biotechnology partners for further development of this exciting drug candidate. Currently, t-PA is the only FDA-approved treatment for stroke and must be administered within three hours of the initiation of stroke. We believe that arimoclomol has the potential to reach a much larger market, as our animal studies have shown statistically significant results even when animals are treated ten hours or more after stroke onset. In addition, clinical testing of arimoclomol for stroke recovery could be less expensive, as more patients could be treated at fewer sites due to the expanded therapeutic window.”