SAN DIEGO, Oct. 09, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Amydis Diagnostics, Inc., a privately-held pharmaceutical company developing proprietary chemistry and innovative approaches for the detection of amyloid-related diseases, announced today that they received a Phase 1 SBIR grant award from the National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The grant award for more than $530,000 will fund research and development efforts for novel ophthalmic diagnostic probes for Cerebral Amyloid Angiopathy (CAA), an age-associated disease in which proteins called amyloid build up on the walls of the arteries in the brain increasing the risk for stroke caused by bleeding, and dementia.
“We are honored to have been selected for this highly competitive grant from NIH, our third award in the past three years. It will allow us to accelerate the development of our innovative chemistry and expand into another disease that involves the presence of amyloid proteins,” stated Stella Sarraf, Ph.D., Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Amydis Diagnostics, Inc. “We believe that the eye represents a window to the brain and can be used as a proxy for diagnosing certain neurological diseases. To our knowledge, we are the first company to explore the possibility of detecting amyloid proteins in the retina associated with CAA.”
CAA is a major cause of spontaneous intracerebral hemorrhage in people older than 55 and an important contributor to age-related cognitive decline. Physicians are unable to diagnosis CAA with certainty without a sample of brain tissue. Current diagnosis of CAA involves expensive imaging tests such as MRI, CT scans, and PET amyloid tests. The development of a non-invasive ophthalmic amyloid test would be of value to physicians. “A retinal test for CAA will enable physicians to take better care of patients by avoiding medications contraindicated in this disease, thereby decreasing their likelihood of having a hemorrhagic stroke,” said Scott Reines, MD PhD, Chief Medical Officer of Amydis. “Such a test would also be extremely useful as an outcome marker in clinical trials focused on therapies for CAA that could stop or reverse progression of the disease by preventing vascular amyloid deposition.”
About Amydis Diagnostics
Amydis Diagnostics, Inc., founded in 2013, is an early stage, privately-held pharmaceutical company focused on its platform of innovative chemistry to detect diseases that involve the presence of amyloid proteins. Amydis has a platform of novel compounds that fluoresces when bound to amyloid proteins, thus enabling non-invasive diagnosis of the such diseases. The Company’s most advanced program is targeting the detection of early stage Alzheimer’s disease, a well-known amyloid disease. Other potential development programs include the detection of Cerebral Amyloid Angiopathy, Parkinson’s disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (mad cow disease), Pre-eclampsia, and TTR Amyloidosis, all of which are associated with the presence of amyloid proteins. For more information on Amydis, please visit http://amydis.com/.
Disclosure
Research reported in this grant publication is supported by the National Institute On Aging of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R43AG058350. The content is solely the responsibility of the Company and Principal Investigators and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.
Amydis Contact:
David H. Crean, Ph.D.
Chief Business Officer
david@amydis.com
858-245-4905