While AdAlta CEO and Managing Director Sam Cobb was in San Francisco earlier this year to present at Biotech Showcase (JP Morgan Healthcare Conference), she was interviewed by Health Invest TV about the enormous commercial potential of our lead i-body candidate, AD-114.
AdAlta is developing AD-114 for treatment of fibrosis, and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF, which is fibrosis of the lung) in particular. There is a high unmet medical need for IPF treatments, and AD-114 has been granted orphan drug status by the FDA to fast-track its development and approval. AD-114 will begin human trials this year.
“There are two products available for the treatment of IPF and they have significant side effects, they work with a limited number of people, and they really slow the disease, they’re not really a cure for the disease,” Sam said.
“AD-114 works in a very different way, it has a very different mechanism of action, and it provides patients an alternative treatment that potentially has a better outcome for them, which we’ll be looking to test.”
Sam explained that deals in the fibrosis space typically occurred much earlier in the clinical development of assets when compared to other disease areas because of high unmet patient need.
“There’s a significant amount of activity in terms of deals in the fibrosis space,” Sam said. “We’ve seen over the last four to five years a lot of assets being acquired at the end of Phase I – where we’ll be at the end of this year – and they’re acquired for significant upfront and milestone payments, $100 million upfront and between four and five hundred million in milestone payments for a single asset at that stage.
“More recently we’ve also seen significant uplifts in market value for companies that progress in phase 2 studies.”