Novogen Announces New Patent Lodgement Covering ATM Technology

Novogen Limited

, announced today the lodgement with the US Patent Office of a key patent covering a novel family of compounds within the Company's anti-tropomyosin (ATM) drug technology platform. These structurally novel compounds are related to the original ATM compounds, including lead drug candidate, Anisina. The lodgement of this new patent is part of the Company's ongoing strategy of seeking a dominant, if not exclusive position, in what it believes to be an entirely new and exciting field of drug discovery. Andrew Heaton PhD, Novogen Group Vice-President of Drug Discovery and Manufacture, said, "The application of our VAL-ID (Versatile Approach to Library based Iterative Design) strategy has now been successfully executed on the ATM technology platform. This process has allowed us to extend the chemistry around our original ATM hit compounds, generating an entirely new family of compounds designed to target the tropomyosin protein. The new family of ATM's filed in today's patent not only extends potential patent coverage around the ATM technology platform, but also allows us to start the design and discovery process for the next generation of ATM lead candidates. We are already starting to see exciting initial in vitro data for this new family of compounds." The ATM technology platform is concerned with drugs that disassemble the microfilament component of a cell's cytoskeleton. The microfilaments and microtubules are the two major structural components of the cytoskeleton, acting variously in concert and separately. The cytoskeleton plays a critical supporting role across most biological functions of a cell including the means of both internal and external communication, cell surface receptor function, cell division and cell movement. Microfilaments have been regarded for many years as a potentially important new drug target, but drug development has stalled because of the ubiquity of the tropomyosin and actin protein components of the microfilament and the inability to selectively target the microfilaments in aberrant cells. Early drug candidates proved to be lethally toxic. Novogen, in partnership with the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, Australia, has overcome the toxicity issue by developing molecules that are directed against selective isoforms of tropomyosin.