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Competitive EU Grant Supports Collaboration to Accelerate Development of AC Immune's First-in-Class TDP-43 Diagnostic Agent
Grant from the ‘EU Joint Programme – Neurodegenerative Disease Research’ (JPND) provides €1.45M in funding for the program AC Immune’s proprietary Morphomer™
About this update from Ac Immune Sa
[{"type":"text","content":"Grant from the ‘EU Joint Programme – Neurodegenerative Disease Research’ (JPND) provides €1.45M in funding for the program\n AC Immune’s proprietary Morphomer™ platform continues accelerating development of first- and best-in-class small molecule therapeutics and diagnostics for neurodegenerative diseases LAUSANNE, Switzerland, Oct. 09, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- AC Immune SA (NASDAQ: ACIU), a Swiss-based, clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company with a broad pipeline focused on neurodegenerative diseases, today announced that a highly competitive European Union grant has been awarded to support the partnership between AC Immune and the JPND ImageTDP-43 consortium to accelerate development of the Company’s first-in-class TDP-43 positron emission tomography (PET) tracer. The grant, which is awarded in response to the European Union JPND’s call for novel imaging and brain stimulation methods and technologies related to neurodegenerative diseases, will be spearheaded through a world-class collaboration with the University of Zurich, Fondazione Santa Lucia-IRCCS, Skåne University Hospital, the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, and the Erasmus University Medical Center through the JPND’s ImageTDP-43 Consortium. Advancement of AC Immune’s TDP-43 PET tracer could deliver the world’s first imaging agent capable of accurately detecting and monitoring the progression of a wide range of TDP-43-related neurodegenerative diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), frontotemporal lobar degeneration with TDP-43 pathology (FTLD-TDP) and limbic-predominant age-related TDP-43 encephalopathy (LATE). Such a TDP-43 imaging agent may also enable the development of precision medicine approaches for Alzheimer’s disease (AD), where pathological aggregation of TDP-43 has emerged as an important co-pathology linked to disease severity. Prof. Andrea Pfeifer, CEO of AC Immune SA, commented: “We are very proud to receive this validation from the EU’s JPND, which reinforces our position as the leader in developing novel therapies and diagnostics against neurodegenerative diseases. Our first-in-class TDP-43 PET tracer has exhibited great promise to date, as it has been shown to bind to brain-derived pathological TDP-43 aggregates with high affinity and direct target engagement on patient brain tissue. The rapid progress ma...