After developing an innovative novel liquid formation of aspirin, Innovate Pharmaceuticals has received crucial support to help it move towards human clinical trials to test how the drug helps patients with both Covid-19 and cancer.
Based in Eccles, Greater Manchester, Innovate Pharmaceuticals is a research-based development stage company that discovers and develops innovative medicines, re-engineers pharmaceutical platforms and breathes new “patent” life into existing pharmaceuticals.
Its Enhanced Liquid Aspirin has been developed to provide an alternative to standard forms of aspirin, offering a number of key benefits, including the ability to dose accurately as well as making it easier to give to people who have difficulty swallowing tablets.
Another important benefit is that liquid aspirin has a much-reduced effect on the gastrointestinal tract compared to aspirin in tablet form, which can cause ulcers and bleeds in the stomach.
Liquid aspirin is also a more potent anti-inflammatory, because unlike normal aspirin it transverses the blood/brain barrier, which means that it could be used to help treat the symptoms of Covid-19 as well as its original purpose of being used to help cancer patients, so Innovate has been given approval from the MHRA and the FDA to start human clinical trials.
Innovate had received support from GC Business Growth Hub’s Innovation Vouchers scheme and needed further support to find a research partner with the expertise to discovered how liquid aspirin compared to standard aspirin in key areas such as blood coagulation.
This anti-platelet effect is crucial because liquid aspirin needs to perform as well as standard aspirin but not significantly better, because that would create a greater risk of causing dangerous bleeds on the brain.
They were referred to MATMED - North West Europe's only dedicated transnational network for the fields of advanced materials, medical devices and regenerative medicine. MATMED enables high-quality transnational collaborations and accelerates the commercialisation of medical applications.
MATMED connected Innovate with Synapse Research Institute in Maastricht, The Netherlands, a world leader in platelet function research. With the help of a MATMED voucher award of 25,000 Euros, the study was completed and showed that liquid aspirin is unlikely to cause a higher incidence of brain bleed in comparison to standard aspirin.
Innovate Pharmaceuticals Director Simon Cohen said: “We believe that liquid aspirin has an important role in how we treat people suffering from a range of diseases, now including Covid-19. Without this support from GC Business Growth Hub and MATMED, we would have found great difficulty in completing the research work required in the timeframe to allow us to start human clinical trials.”