NIH Awards $2.87m Grant To Ceragenix

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded a $2.87m grant to Ceragenix Pharmaceuticals to fund the pre clinical development of a Ceragenin based oral drug to treat two common and potentially deadly gastrointestinal infections Clostrdium difficile and Shigella.

Ceragenins are a class of novel antimicrobial compounds that mimic functions of the body’s own innate immune system. The grant would fund the preclinical development, formulation, toxicology and cGMP scale up to 1kg of CSA-13.

Steve Porter, chairman and CEO of Ceragenix, said: “We are very pleased that the NIH sees potential in our technology as an oral drug to treat these dangerous infections. This represents the second NIH grant awarded this year to researchers who are pursuing the development of the Ceragenin technology.

“In addition to the research being funded by the NIH, we continue to make excellent progress in our development efforts for use of this technology to provide an antimicrobial coating for medical devices to help reduce the incidence of hospital acquired infections. We believe that the NIH funded research activities will be synergistic with our development efforts on antimicrobial medical device coatings.”

The research grant has been awarded to a consortium of research institutions led by Brigham Young University (BYU) and including SRI International (Menlo Park, CA), Southwest Research Institute (SwRI, San Antonio, TX) and McMaster University (Hamilton, Ontario, Canada).