On January 3, 2019 Moleculin Biotech, Inc., (Nasdaq: MBRX) ("Moleculin" or the "Company"), a clinical stage pharmaceutical company focused on the development of oncology drug candidates, all of which are based on license agreements with The University of Texas System on behalf of the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, reported that in preliminary animal studies, a second of its lead drugs, WP1732, has demonstrated enhanced activity in combination with checkpoint blockade antibodies in pancreatic cancer (Press release, Moleculin, JAN 3, 2019, View Source [SID1234532405]).

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"After our sponsored research demonstrated that WP1066 was able to enhance immune checkpoint activity in a pancreatic cancer animal model," commented Walter Klemp, Moleculin’s Chairman and CEO, "we were optimistic that we could show similar potential results in our water soluble, WP1732 drug candidate. This is significant for several reasons. It shows that this is a consistent capability across our platform of STAT3 inhibitors and it further supports independent research suggesting that STAT3 may be a key to enabling checkpoint blockade activity in otherwise resistant tumors. Importantly, though, when you couple this with our recent findings that WP1732 accumulates disproportionately in the pancreas, we believe it points to WP1732 as a potentially pivotal new approach to treating pancreatic cancer. Expansion of the WP1732 and WP1066 in vivo studies is in progress."