Mercia Pharmaceuticals

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	"Developer and manufacturer of safe, effective and affordable immunotherapeutic products for the prevention and treatment of chronic diseases."

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About Mercia Pharma

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Adjuvant Systems
Immunotherapeutic Products

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Immunotherapeutic Products

Mercia has the ability to manufacture immunotherapeutic products that produce a targeted, safe, effective, and reversible immune response for safe long-term management of chronic diseases.

"Our strategy is simple"

Focus on development of promising late pre-clinical/early clinical stage product candidates through “clinical proof of concept”.

Build a pipeline of proprietary products through strategic alliances with leading academic researchers and innovators.

Partner with major pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies to complete late stage product development and for marketing and distribution of our proprietary products.

“Chronic diseases are a significant medical and economic challenge”

In the USA alone about 100 million people suffer from chronic illnesses. More than two thirds of hospital admissions and physicians visits are for the treatment of chronic conditions as are about 88% of filled prescriptions. There is an urgent need for convenient long-lasting therapies for treatment of patients suffering from chronic illness.

Mercia’s approach is to exploit the power of the patient's own immune system to target molecules involved in the disease process. The approach builds on the proven safety and effectiveness of active vaccination in preventing infectious disease, and the specificity of therapeutic monoclonal antibodies in effectively neutralizing disease-causing molecules. Mercia’s active immunotherapeutic approach combines these concepts to treat chronic diseases.

Immunotherapeutic products that harness a patient’s own immune system to modulate the activity of disease causing molecules have the potential to alleviate the symptoms of a disease for a long period of time, perhaps even to prevent the appearance of symptoms altogether.

We have secured licenses to, and have generated our own intellectual property related to therapeutic vaccine technologies and are in the process of assembling a pipeline of immunotherapeutic products in key therapeutic areas.

Diabetes Immunotherapeutic

Type 1 diabetes, is a serious, life threatening metabolic disorder which affects just over 10% of the 15 million diabetics in the U.S.A. alone.

Mercia has the exclusive rights to a diabetes therapeutic vaccine toleragen from the Joslin Diabetes Center, a worldwide leader in diabetes research and treatment, affiliated with the Harvard Medical School.

In Type 1 diabetes the body mounts an autoimmune response to pancreatic cells and the molecules they produce, including insulin. The Joslin toleragen acts as a vaccine that induces an immune response in the diabetic patient that delays the onset of the autoimmune reaction and progression of the disease. The toleragen has already demonstrated success in animal models and is currently in a Phase I, FDA approved, NIH funded clinical trial.

Joslin and Mercia are working together to further develop the tolaragen using Mercia’s proprietary therapeutic vaccine technology and adjuvant systems.

Asthma Immunotherapeutic

	Asthma is a serious, life-threatening condition with over 17 million sufferers in the U.S.A. and over 100 million worldwide. While current therapies such as inhaled steroids provide adequate disease control they do so at the cost of severe side effects. There is a need for safer long acting asthma therapeutics. Mercia is sponsoring research at the Leukocyte Biology Section, Faculty of Medicine, Imperial College London, to develop its proprietary multivalent immunogen as a new class of therapeutic agent for asthma and allergic disorders. Mercia’s therapeutic vaccine will simultaneously immunize patients against multiple targets involved in the disease. The lead targets are immune system chemical messengers which are integral to the allergic and asthmatic response. By active immunization, the body’s own immune system is recruited to simultaneously control the levels of these messengers for prolonged periods. Immunization against these targets represents a novel therapeutic approach for the treatment of asthma and other allergic conditions. In this way the severity of the allergic and asthmatic symptoms will be ameliorated and the reliance on medications such as steroids, with their significant side effects, will be reduced.