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news.N4 Pharma Plc, the specialist pharmaceutical company which reformulates existing drugs and vaccines to improve their performance, announces that it has been awarded a feasibility grant from Innovate UK, the UK's innovation agency, to co-fund a collaborative project with MedImmune UK, a leading global biologics R&D company, to explore the manufacture of a prototype nanomedicine using N4 Pharma's Nuvec system.
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The grant is from Innovate UK's Medicines Manufacturing Round 1: Challenge Fund, which itself is funded through the UK Government's £70m Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund to speed up the development of new medicines, details of which were announced on 22 January 2018 by Sam Gyimah, MP, the Universities and Science Minister. The project with MedImmune is expected to last for approximately nine months from 1 February 2018.
The grant is to enable N4 Pharma to develop manufacturing methods for Nuvec® particles loaded with therapeutic pDNA/mRNA encoding antigens and to demonstrate that such nanoparticles can be manufactured to the quality required for in-vivo studies. MedImmune will then evaluate these Nuvec formulations in relevant in-vitro and in-vivo models to demonstrate if they are able to deliver functional pDNA/mRNA capable of inducing an immune response.
Under the terms of the collaboration agreement with the Company, MedImmune has the right at any time during the collaboration project, and 3 months following its conclusion, to give notice that it wishes to negotiate the terms on which N4 would grant it an exclusive licence to utilise the results of the evaluation.
Further information on each of MedImmune UK and Innovate UK is set out below.
Nigel Theobald, CEO of N4 Pharma, commented: "We are delighted to have been awarded the feasibility grant from Innovate UK and to have the opportunity to work with MedImmune UK on this collaborative project. We continue to make great progress with our Nuvec® particles and we believe that MedImmune is the ideal partner to evaluate our nanoparticles in this field."