This is the last day of the Liver Meeting® 2006 or the 57th Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (AASLD) and so the drug pipeline on the Hepatitis viruses is in focus.
Here goes another one:
Pharmasset, Inc. (705993) has recently updated its collaboration with Roche (OTC: RHHBY) for the development of nucleoside polymerase inhibitors for the treatment of chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV) infections.
Under a USFDA Investigational New Drug Application, Pharmasset has already initiated the oral dosing of R7128 in a Phase 1 clinical trial designed to assess the safety and pharmacokinetics of R7128 in healthy volunteers, as well as provide antiviral potency data over 14-days in HCV- infected individuals.
According to Schaefer Price, President & CEO of Pharmasset:
"We have jointly advanced this program from its discovery in our laboratories into the clinic. We are hopeful that R7128's excellent in vitro potency will translate into clinical benefits for patients with chronic hepatitis C, because we believe that polymerase inhibitors have the potential to become an important component of HCV combination therapy."
A prodrug of PSI-6130 (a pyrimidine nucleoside analog inhibitor of RNA polymerase, an enzyme that is necessary for hepatitis C viral replication), R7128 is a polymerase inhibitor being developed for the treatment of chronic hepatitis C.
Read more from the press release.
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