Benzinga | Jan 13, 2022 11:48AM EST

Altamira Therapeutics Provides Update On RNA Therapeutics Program

Altamira Therapeutics Ltd. (NASDAQ:CYTO), a company dedicated to addressing unmet medical needs through RNA therapeutics, allergy and viral infection protection, and inner ear therapeutics, today provided a business update on its development activities in RNA therapeutics.

Growing the Leadership Team

As part of its ongoing repositioning around RNA therapeutics, the Company is expanding its leadership team with the appointment of Covadonga Pa?eda, Ph.D. as Chief Development Officer (CDO), effective early April 2022.

Dr. Pa?eda's mandate will be overseeing and advancing the further development of Altamira's delivery platforms for extrahepatic nucleotide delivery. She brings rich experience to the Company, acquired since 2008 through various roles with pharmaceutical companies, contract research organizations and in the venture capital sector in Europe. Most recently, she served as Director of Development at Limm Therapeutics, a neuroimmune biopharmaceutical company. Previously, she spent seven years as R&D Manager at Sylentis S.A., a clinical stage RNAi biopharmaceuticals company. Dr. Pa?eda obtained a Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the Faculty of Medicine at Universidad Aut?noma, Madrid, Spain, and spent several years as a Post-doc at the Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA. She holds a Master of Management of Biotechnology Companies from the Fundaci?n Genoma Espa?a, Madrid, Spain.

"We are very pleased to grow our leadership team with the hiring of Dr Pa?eda as Chief Development Officer," commented Thomas Meyer, Altamira Therapeutics' founder, Chairman and CEO. "Together with our Chief Scientific Officer, Dr. Samuel Wickline, and a growing development team, she will be instrumental in driving the further progress of our OligoPhore and SemaPhore platforms for extrahepatic delivery of siRNA, mRNA or other nucleotides. We look forward to exciting progress in our RNA therapeutics business in 2022 and the years to come."

Award of NIH Grant to Support Extrahepatic RNA Delivery in Inflammatory Disorders

The Company's U.S. subsidiary, Altamira Therapeutics Inc., was recently awarded a Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) grant by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to help address the lack of effective systemic delivery technologies for RNA structures that might target diseases occurring beyond the liver. The project, titled "A Peptide-Based Polyplex Platform for Nucleotides Delivery to the Sites of Inflammation," will help to move the Company's OligoPhore(tm) delivery platform towards clinical stage evaluations in inflammatory disorders by demonstrating safety and effectiveness in a mouse model of rheumatoid arthritis and optimizing a commercially scalable formulation process. The project will be carried out with an academic research partner.