PIPELINE PRODUCTS PENDING APPROVAL OF HADASIT TRANSACTION

Hepatitis C virus is spread mainly through blood-borne routes, with limited sexual and maternal transfer.  About 2-3% of the world’s population (170m people) are infected with HCV, and in the USA alone between 3-4m people have chronic HCV infection. Initial symptoms can be mild but develop to include fever, joint pain and fatigue with 20% of infected people progressing to cirrhosis and liver cancer.  There is currently no Vaccine for the prevention or treatment of HCV infection (unlike Hepatitis A and Hepatitis B). The standard of care is to use the oral antiviral Ribavarin in combination with the injectable biological Interferon alpha (IFN). Roche and Schering Plough both market pegylated forms of Interferon that gives a longer plasma half-life than unmodified Interferons. Interferon alpha is thought to work by inducing anti-viral responses in liver cells but may also act to limit inflammatory mediator production.  While effective in general, a large proportion of the patients cannot tolerate the therapies due to severe side effects. 

According to Datamonitor, the Hepatitis C market was worth $2.3 billion in 2007, with forecast sales to grow to $4.5billion by 2017, Melnikova predicts a market of $10-15billion by 2017.  This increase is predicted to be driven primarily by the launch of the new protease inhibitors.

Immuron is developing an oral immunotherapy for Hepataitis C which will be based on a revolutionary technology to be acquired from Hadassah Medical Center (Pending a deal, announced in April 2009).