Benzinga | Jul 29, 2020 07:39AM EDT

Moleculin Biotech Highlights Publication At University of Campinas Demonstrating 'RS-CoV-2 infection is supported by elevated glucose levels and that inhibition of glycolysis with 2-deoxy-D-glucose ("2-DG") effectively eliminated viral load in vitro'

HOUSTON, July 29, 2020 /PRNewswire/ --Moleculin Biotech, Inc., (NASDAQ:MBRX) ("Moleculin" or the "Company"), a clinical stage pharmaceutical company with a broad portfolio of drug candidates targeting highly resistant tumors and viruses, today announced that a recent publication by an independent research team at the University of Campinas in S?o Paulo, Brazil demonstrated that SARS-CoV-2 infection is supported by elevated glucose levels and that inhibition of glycolysis with 2-deoxy-D-glucose ("2-DG") effectively eliminated viral load in vitro.

The paper was presented in Cell Metabolism journal online (Codo et al., Elevated Glucose Levels Favor SARS-CoV-2 Infection and Monocyte Response through a HIF-1a/Glycolysis-Dependent Axis, Cell Metabolism (2020)), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cmet.2020.07.007) after peer-review and reports the findings of a research team at the Laboratory of Immunometabolism, Department of Genetics, Evolution, Microbiology and Immunology, Institute of Biology, University of Campinas, Campinas, S?o Paulo, Brazil.

"We believe these findings are an important additional independent support of our approach focused on targeting glucose metabolism to control SARS-CoV-2 and support our efforts to develop an antimetabolite prodrug such as WP1122 as a potential new treatment for COVID-19," commented Walter Klemp, Chairman and CEO of Moleculin. "2-DG is the active ingredient released from WP1122 after oral administration, and accordingly, we believe that dual targeting of both glycolysis and glycosylation contributes to observed biological activity. While this paper provides a deeper understanding of how important glycolysis is to COVID-19 and demonstrates in vitro activity of 2-DG, we believe the implications for developing 2-DG alone as an effective new therapy would be limited due to the lack of its drug-like properties. However, that's where WP1122 shows promise. Our animal data shows that drug concentration and tissue/organ distribution of 2-DG are significantly enhanced when 2-DG is delivered via WP1122."

This recently published data also further supports the findings published in the scientific journal, Nature (Bojkova, D. et al. Proteomics of SARS-CoV-2-infected host cells reveals therapy targets, Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2332-72020), which reports that one of the therapeutic targets in SARS-CoV-2 is glycolysis. This work performed by an independent research team at the G?ethe-University of Frankfurt showed that targeting glycolysis with 2-DG stopped replication of SARS CoV-2 in vitro. These results are consistent with previous research reports demonstrating the antiviral activities of 2-DG in other viruses and with the Company's own antiviral testing of WP1122. Notwithstanding the available preclinical data, the Company believes that, without the benefit of WP1122's prodrug structure, 2-DG's rapid metabolism and limited drug-like properties prevent it from being sufficiently effective in vivo and that in vivo testing of WP1122 may make its benefits more apparent.