FemmePharma, Inc. and Emory University Team to Identify Topical Microbicides for Drug Development

10-Feb-2004

WAYNE, Pa.- FemmePharma, Inc., a prescription pharmaceutical company dedicated to developing drugs for diseases and disorders disproportionately affecting women, has initiated a collaboration with Emory University to study a library of molecules and their respective activity against HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). The intention of the collaboration is to identify lead candidates for the drug development process. "This new collaboration with FemmePharma is of critical importance in developing these microbicides as products for protection against HIV," said Richard W. Compans, Ph.D., principal investigator of the Emory topical microbicide program project grant from NIH, and Professor and Chair of the department of microbiology and immunology. A collaborative group including researchers from Emory, Georgia State University, and Louisiana State University has been studying the ability of porphyrins and related compounds to inhibit infection by HIV since 1999. This project has been supported by NIH for the last four years, and the group has shown that several of the compounds tested are indeed virucidal, i.e., they inactivate infectivity of cell-free HIV virions. This virucidal activity is at least in part due to interactions with the HIV envelope protein, which is responsible for initiating viral infection. The new collaboration with FemmePharma will advance these active compounds to clinical trials. Compounds will first be synthesized, purified, and characterized in biological studies, and the activity of the lead compounds against infectious HIV-1 virions will be determined. Effective compounds will be screened using animal models prior to formulation and human testing by FemmePharma.

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