Poolbeg Pharma (POLB ), a clinical stage infectious disease company, announced it has signed an exclusive license agreement with University College Dublin (UCD) for a late preclinical stage vaccine candidate for Melioidosis.
The license agreement builds on the December 2021 option agreement that Poolbeg signed with UCD.
The vaccine candidate, known internally as POLB 003, was developed after years of research by Associate Professor Siobhán McClean of the UCD School of Biomolecular and Biomedical Science. Additional funding for the vaccine was made available by the Wellcome Trust.
Melioidosis, also known as Whitmore's disease, is an infectious disease caused by the bacterium Burkholderia pseudomallei, with a currently high mortality rate of 54%. Poolbeg identified it as an infectious disease of interest because of its rising incidence around the world due to climate change, and its resistance to antibiotic treatment.
There is currently no vaccine for Melioidosis.
As part of December's option agreement with UCD, Poolbeg is also evaluating five other vaccine candidates being developed by Associate Professor McClean and her team. These are Escherichia coli (O157), Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Burkholderia cepacia complex, and Acinetobacter baumannii
Jeremy Skillington, PhD, CEO of Poolbeg Pharma commented:
"Melioidosis presents a growing threat to global health as an infectious disease with no approved vaccine and a high mortality rate. POLB 003 is being developed in line with our capital light approach and represents a significant opportunity for Poolbeg. Combined with the Company's expertise in infectious diseases it provides the perfect combination to contribute to the global response to this unmet-medical need and potential to generate significant returns for our investors."
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This is a milestone agreement for Poolbeg. After completing its due diligence on December's option agreement, the company has now secured an exclusive license agreement with NovaUCD for POLB 003.
There is currently no vaccine for Melioidosis. Patients receive a lengthy antibiotic treatment, with a very high mortality rate of 54% for the 165,000 global cases per year. While the disease has typically been confined to tropical and subtropical regions, due to climate change it is spreading beyond those geographies. It was recently detected as far north as Minnesota, and the US CDC has designated it a biothreat.
Therefore, there is significant unmet medical need for an effective treatment, and Poolbeg Pharma is very well-positioned to bring the first ever Melioidosis vaccine to market.
Poolbeg's business model is nonstandard as it aims to develop and bring products through to early human proof of concept in the clinic, then partner with pharma and biotech companies that continue the pipeline to production and distribution. Thus, Poolbeg profits from the relatively inexpensive human trial process, and then exits at the scale-up stage.
In the next 6 months, the company will hit a number of important milestones, including initial results from the LPS human challenge trial for its flagship POLB 001 treatment by year-end, and preliminary outputs from its RSV and influenza AI drug discovery programmes by year-end and Q2 2023 respectively.
Since the outbreak of Covid-19, infectious disease has become one of the fastest growing pharma markets and is expected to exceed $250bn by 2025. With its strong cash position of £18.9m as of 30 June 2022, Poolbeg is successfully targeting this growing market.
However, whilst analysts at finnCap believe the in-licensing and development of a vaccine for the prevention of Melioidosis could be value-accretive in the long term, they make no changes to forecasts or target price at this time.
POLB shares were up 3% this morning on the news.
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