LIPIGON PHARMACEUTICALS ENTERS INTO TARGET VALIDATION RESEARCH AGREEMENT WITH GERMAN ANTISENSE COMPANY SECARNA

"We are very pleased for this exciting opportunity to work together with Secarna, bringing forward what we believe will be the most powerful plasma lipid lowering agent on the market", stated CEO and co-founder Stefan K. Nilsson. He added, "This agreement utilizes Secarna's state of the art next generation antisense platform technology and our lipid biology expertise. The lead time from choosing targets to actually validating the product candidate is exceptionally short, therefore the antisense approach is extremely attractive to us".

Dyslipidemia indications span from very rare diseases like Familial Chylomicronemia Syndrome (FCS) or Homozygote Familial Hypercholesterolemia with 3-5000 patients worldwide to broad indications like cardiovascular disease, metabolic liver diseases and kidney disease. There are over 60 million patients at risk in G7 due to dyslipidemia and only 12 % of high risk patients meet their combined plasma lipid goals.

Antisense technology significantly expands the universe of potentially druggable targets and is currently experiencing strong growth. Well over 100 clinical trials are ongoing or have completed recently. With several drug approvals last year, this could be considered the definitive breakthrough of this technology.

"Targeting lipid disorders via antisense oligonucleotides is an extremely attractive proposition," commented Secarna's CEO Jonas Renz. "We are delighted to leverage Lipigon's unique insights into lipid biology and apply our proprietary platform to generating highly potent and safe lead molecules".