I appreciate the improved consistency of message - I think one...

I appreciate the improved consistency of message - I think one is now able to get a better grasp of where the company is heading. The following goes back to the newsletter of February last year when the company’s commercialisation strategy was described as having two arms – the “fully integrated drug development platform”, which is the internal oncology program and the “value adding to existing cargoes to increase their potency” external collaboration program, to which this latest announcement relates. The strategy described early last year is now becoming clearer.

Arm 1: ‘Value Adding’ existing drug cargoes to increase their potency

Phylogica is combining our novel delivery technology with existing smart drugs to show we can improve their activity by improved intracellular delivery.

To validate this approach we’ve hand-picked a panel of well characterised therapeutic cargoes and then assessed their activity when linked to our ‘best-in-class’ cell penetrating peptides. The outcome of this work has generated some highly encouraging data and established two very important principles.

Firstly: our delivery solution offers potencies that consistently surpass those achieved using the previous gold-standard cell penetrating technology.

Secondly: we can deliver different types of smart drugs with potencies below the micromolar (μM) level. Not only does this confirm our platform is robust, but it also addresses a key challenge from the pharmaceutical industry to show that our cell penetrating peptides can successfully deliver smart drugs (ie .biologics) in the submicromolar range – widely acknowledged as a key potency threshold.

Phylogica is now engaging with select academic and commercial collaborators to access a broader range of therapeutic cargoes, as well as their established cellular and animal models systems where we can rapidly evaluate functional activity.

The overall goal is to show that Phylogica’s cell penetrating platform offers a versatile solution for delivering a broad range of therapeutic smart drugs, including proteins and peptides and potentially even nucleic acids ( e g siRNA or antisense oligonucleotides), inside diseased cells. We will look forward to updating investors with results from these collaborations

Arm 2: developing a fully integrated drug development platform

We are also determined to transition Phylogica’s world-class platform technologies into valuable commercial products. With the recent launch of our inhouse oncology program, Phylogica has already taken a significant step towards achieving this goal.


In last month’s Shareholder Update, it was stated that a number of PYC’s external collaborations (Arm 1) were at a similar stage of development to Phylogica’s internal program (Arm 2) and were “expected to begin providing data on the efficacy of Phylomers as a delivery technology over the coming months”.

I guess that means we can look forward to further news related to other external collaborations.