Transcode Therapeutics announces eIND submission to U.S. FDA

TransCode Therapeutics announced that it has submitted an exploratory Investigational New Drug, eIND, application to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, FDA, for a planned First-in-Human Phase 0 clinical trial. The planned clinical trial is to evaluate TransCode’s lead therapeutic candidate, TTX-MC138, in cancer patients with advanced solid tumors. TTX-MC138 is designed to inhibit the pro-metastatic RNA, microRNA-10b, described as the master regulator of metastasis in a number of advanced solid tumors. TransCode believes that TTX-MC138 could be used as a treatment for many of these cancers. "We are very excited to take this next step in the development of TTX-MC138 which we hope will bring us closer to introducing this first of its kind treatment for metastatic disease," said TransCode’s Chief Executive Officer and co-founder, Michael Dudley. "We are hopeful that the study conducted under the eIND will demonstrate successful delivery of our lead therapeutic candidate to metastatic lesions in patients with advanced solid tumors. The delivery of oligonucleotide therapeutics to sites other than the liver has remained a significant challenge for decades. Overcoming this challenge would represent an unprecedented step in unlocking therapeutic access to a variety of well documented genetic targets involved in a range of cancers and beyond." The company believes that TTX-MC138 has the potential to produce regression without recurrence in a range of cancers, including breast, pancreatic, ovarian and colon cancer, glioblastomas and others. A Phase 0 clinical trial is an exploratory study conducted under an Investigational New Drug application. Exploratory IND studies usually involve very limited human exposure to a therapeutic candidate; their primary purpose is to evaluate the candidate’s safety and mechanism of action. In TransCode’s planned clinical trial, up to 12 patients will be given a single dose of radiolabeled TTX-MC138 followed by noninvasive positron emission tomography-magnetic resonance imaging.