Armaceutica, Inc. is a pharmaceutical company developing a cancer drug which is essentially free from serious side effects.

Our drug was shown to be “well tolerated” (1) and (2). Current cancer treatmentshave serious and debilitating side effects. Our drug’s excellent safety profile has the potential to be a major disrupting force in the cancer-drug marketplace as physicians and patients prefer to avoid the serious side effects associated with chemotherapy. Being essentially free from serious sideeffects means our drug can out-compete other cancer drugs.

Our Chief Scientific Officer, Renato Aguilera, PhD, and Professor of Biology at the University of Texas at El Paso, discovered that our drug can kill - not just inhibit - cells responsible for various types of cancer (3).

Studies using our drug (PND) on mice with metastatic breast cancer demonstrated that the group that received PND had smaller tumor volumes than controls (P<0.0001) (5).

On September 3, 2020 the Australian patent office granted our first patent on this scientific breakthrough (4).Patent attorney Belinda Hartmann, JD, PhD notesourapplicationwas granted without even one objection to novelty or inventive step. Our developmental-stage drug is targeted on certain types of leukemia, pancreatic and breast cancer. If you or a loved one has ever been treated with chemo or targeted therapy, you will understand how devastating and emotional the sideeffects can be.

Our goal is to provide cancer patients - in particular children -with an effective treatment that is free from the horrible side effects associated with other cancer therapies.

“Having lost my father to liver cancer, I have a personal interest in seeing this product fully commercialized.” Ernest T. Armstrong, MBA, Founder and CEO

References

• (1) Croft et al., Malaria Journal 2012, 11:270 http://www.malariajournal.com/content/11/1/270
• (2) Bailly C, Biopolymers. 2020;e23398, Pyronaridine: An update of its pharmacological activities and mechanisms of action, 17 Aug 2020. https://doi.org/10.1002/bip.23398
• (3) Villanueva, PJ, Aguilera, RJ, et al., Pyronaridine exerts potent cytotoxicity on human breast and hematological cancer cells through induction of apoptosis. PLOS ONE November 5, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0206467
• (4) http://pericles.ipaustralia.gov.au/ols/auspat/applicationDetails.do?applicationNo=2019291491
• (5) Villanueva, PJ, Aguilera, RJ, et al., The Antimalarial Drug Pyronaridine Inhibits Topoisomerase II in Breast Cancer Cells and Hinders Tumor Progression In Vivo, https://www.eurekaselect.com/191585/article

PND exerted a significant selective cytotoxicity (SCI) index on four out of six of breast cancer cell lines tested as compared with its non-cancerous breast MCF-10A cells. The highest SCI value on the leukemia/lymphoma cells tested corresponded to the HL-60 cell line with an SCI value of 3.5. PND exhibited an SCI value of 3 and 3.3, for Ramos and Jurkat cells. Good selectivity was detected on the melanoma cell line (SCI = 3.2) and two of the three ovarian cancer lines tested (SCI = 3.9) (Table 1).

Armaceutica is sponsoring a clinical trial titled: A Phase 2a, Multi-centre, Randomised, Double-blinded, Placebo-controlled Clinical Trial to Evaluate the Safety and Efficacy of Pyronaridine as an Add-on Therapy in Adults with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia and Acute Myeloid Leukemia.

Our study is in countries where pyronaridine is an approved drug, including: Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Senegal, Burkina Faso, and Cambodia.
The primary objective of the study is a comparison of survival lengths between the patients receiving pyronaridine and placebo.