Gilead has decided to strike out on its own in a quest to develop an oral formulation of its COVID antiviral remdesivir, walking away from a collaboration with NJ-based Matinas BioPharma.
In the biotech's business update and 2023 strategic outlook, Matinas revealed that despite a series of successful studies using its proprietary lipid nanocrystal (LNC) delivery platform to develop an oral version of remdesivir, Gilead let the company know what it will be leaving the pact and focusing development efforts on its internal oral nucleoside prodrug of remdesivir.
The pact had initially been inked back in Dec. 2020, when Matinas announced the plan to collaborate with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to test oral formulations of remdesivir in preclinical models.
By the middle of 2022, Matinas had reported that data from an in vivo study of oral LNC-remdesivir in mice infected with SARS-CoV-2 demonstrated significant improvement in multiple histologic markers of lung injury with oral LNC remdesivir at both day 2 and day 5.
All is not lost for Matinas, however. The small bio still has ongoing collaborations with BioNTech and, recently, National Resilience, in the gene therapy and mRNA space.
