slowfast3 Apr 2013 11:54
Silence Therapeutics’ (LON:SLN) finance director Tim Freeborn suggests the market is not picking up on the potential of the company’s ‘gene silencing’ technology.
New York-listed Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, which has a market value of almost US$1.5bn, is one of Silence’s closest peers, targeting liver cancer.
Freeborn says Silence, whose platform technologies can be used to turn off faulty genes, has the potential to tackle a wider array of diseases than its American peer yet is valued at just US$50mln (£33mln).
Freeborn told Proactive Investors: “These other companies have been spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year, year after year, and Silence’s burn is a fraction of what they are spending.
“And yet we think we’re either level with them or doing better – so that’s why we’re hopeful.”
Shares in Silence surged by as much as 25% today after a phase 1b/2a clinical trial of its ATU027 compound for cancer was given the green light by the German authorities.
The trial, which will be carried out on pancreatic cancer patients, will last an initial three months, with the second element scheduled to begin in July this year and to finish around July 2014.
“We’ve kept a low profile so far as we’re still formulating our detailed plans,” continued Freeborn.
“The cancer is very useful for getting into the clinic because the safety barrier is lower for oncology. But once you’re there, you have a foothold and you can start doing other things.
“This is where it gets interesting,” the finance director said.
One of the reasons phase 1 took so long, Freeborn adds, was because the company kept having to significantly escalate the does to get an adverse reaction to the drug. This, he says, reveals how safe ATU027 is.
Silence has also been encouraged by the Germans to apply for ATU027 trials as a combination therapy across a wide range of cancers thanks to the “exceptional safety profile” in phase 1.
These further trials could be run broadly in parallel with pancreatic cancer, the German authority has indicated.
Also today, the company reported what it called “excellent” results from proof of concept studies in acute liver injury.
Importantly, the studies revealed that Silence's new lipid formulation, DBTC, is effective at delivering RNAi treatments to liver tissues.
On the basis of this success as well as other results, Silence is moving ahead with plans to target non oncology indications including orphan and rare diseases, it said.
The firm believes that gene-silencing based therapeutics are on the cusp of a new wave of development and it is actively looking at an “aggressive expansion of its platform, drug targets and key personnel”.
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