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SAN DIEGO, CA - October 16, 2003 -- Metabasis Therapeutics, Inc. announced today that it has been awarded a two year Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant of up to $2.4 million by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) entitled "Liver-Targeted Prodrugs for the Treatment of Hepatitis C". The grant supports research at Metabasis focused on identifying potent, efficacious and safe drugs for the treatment of hepatitis C patients using the company's proprietary HepDirect technology. The HepDirect technology is a prodrug technology developed and patented by Metabasis that enables liver targeting of the biologically active form of a wide variety of new and existing drugs. Liver targeting can increase liver drug levels and reduce peripheral exposure to the active compound and thereby result in more effective and safe drugs for treating liver diseases. It is estimated that greater than 170 million people are infected with hepatitis C worldwide. Despite recent improvements in current therapies, a large segment of this population is still not adequately treated. Nucleosides represent a class of compounds commonly used to treat viral infections such as hepatitis C. To date, however, few nucleosides other than the marketed drug ribavirin have proven effective against hepatitis C. Poor efficacy is attributed in many cases to poor conversion of the nucleoside to the corresponding nucleoside triphosphate, or NTP, which is the active form of the drug. Metabasis believes its HepDirect technology can overcome this limitation and lead to higher NTP levels in the liver while simultaneously decreasing NTP levels outside of the liver, which in some cases will result in improved safety. Mark Erion, Executive Vice President of Research and Development stated, "We are excited to receive this award from NIAID. We plan to use the funding to expand our nucleoside and HepDirect prodrug libraries, which we believe will help us to identify new inhibitors of an enzyme important for hepatitis C viral replication. The funding will also support our efforts to further develop a cell-based screen that we believe will provide information useful for selecting a development candidate. Our HepDirect prodrug technology is being used with Metabasis' drug candidates for hepatitis B and primary liver cancer and we believe it will prove useful for targeting drugs designed to treat hepatitis C infections to the liver." Metabasis Therapeutics, Inc. (www.mbasis.com) is a privately held,
biopharmaceutical company that develops proprietary products principally
for the treatment of liver and liver-related metabolic diseases.
Metabasis has expertise in the fields of nucleoside/nucleotide chemistry
and metabolism, liver biology and liver-specific drug delivery.
Metabasis has discovered and developed a new class of drug candidates
for treating diabetes that act to lower liver glucose production
in diabetic patients. The first drug candidate from this program,
CS-917, is being developed in collaboration with Sankyo Co., Ltd.
and is currently undergoing clinical testing. Metabasis has also
developed its HepDirect technology that allows liver-specific delivery
of new and existing drugs. Two novel drug candidates derived from
the HepDirect technology are in clinical testing: a drug for hepatitis
B called Hepavir B, developed in collaboration with Ribapharm, Inc.,
and a drug for primary liver cancer called MB7133, to which Metabasis
retains exclusive rights.
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