On October 15, 2024 Lomond Therapeutics, a subsidiary of Eilean Therapeutics LLC, a biopharmaceutical company dedicated to discovering and developing best-in-class and first-in-class small molecule inhibitors to target escape mutations in hematologic and solid malignancies, reported that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has cleared Lomond’s Investigational New Drug (IND) application for a Phase 1 multicenter study evaluating the feasibility, safety, and efficacy of lonitoclax in patients with relapsed/refractory chronic lymphocytic leukemia, small lymphocytic lymphoma, and select low-grade lymphomas (Press release, Lomond Therapeutics, OCT 15, 2024, View Source [SID1234647214]).
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"We are pleased with the progress we have made to date and excited with the FDA clearance of our IND to initiate patient testing of lonitoclax," said Dr. Iain Dukes, Chief Executive Officer of Eilean Therapeutics. "Given the highly differentiated pre-clinical and healthy volunteer profile of lonitoclax, we believe that lonitoclax has the potential to be the best-in-class BCL-2 inhibitor and look forward to working with the leukemia and lymphoma community in initiating our Phase 1 clinical study."
About Lonitoclax
Lonitoclax has earlier reported novel binding, best-in-class potency and selectivity against BCL-2, a key pro-survival protein that is overexpressed in many cancers. This clinical candidate demonstrated equivalent in vivo anti-tumor efficacy to venetoclax in B cell and myeloid malignancy cell lines and in vivo models. Compared to venetoclax, lonitoclax exhibits significantly less suppression of non-malignant immune cell populations, a result that suggests superior selectivity, and an improved safety profile. Lonitoclax has previously completed a series of healthy volunteer studies where no safety signals were observed at exposures where ex vivo activation of caspase in CLL primary cells was observed, a surrogate marker of BCL-2 inhibition in tumors. This emphasizes important advantages over venetoclax and venetoclax-like molecules in safety, tolerability, and feasibility of outpatient treatment, enabling the molecule to safely target AML and CLL patients alone and in combination with other targeted therapies.