10 September 2018 - - Canadian emerging pharmaceutical company Cyclenium Pharma Inc and Austrian biotechnology company Haplogen Bioscience GmbH, have been awarded Eureka label in recognition of the high degree of innovation and market potential for their joint programme on the development of pan-flaviviral pharmaceuticals, the companies said.

Eureka, established in 1985, is an intergovernmental network of funding bodies and ministries of more than 40 countries, primarily in Europe, and associated countries, including Canada.

The Eureka label is given to companies developing high value-added projects passing stringent assessment criteria.

This project, the result of a close and highly effective collaboration between the two companies that started in early 2015, focuses on the development of novel small molecule macrocycle inhibitors of an enzyme target critical to the life cycle of flaviviruses.

It exploits Cyclenium's proprietary CMRT drug discovery technology together with Haplogen's exquisite expertise in flaviviral biology to identify new agents for therapeutic and prophylactic use against all major pathogenic organisms from this family, including dengue, Zika, West Nile, Japanese encephalitis and yellow fever viruses.

Cyclenium will be responsible for all medicinal chemistry efforts associated with current lead optimization to clinical candidates, while Haplogen Bioscience will continue to thoroughly characterize the biological and pharmacological properties of these novel molecules.

The partners intend to jointly develop and commercialize the resulting drug candidates.

For these late stage discovery efforts, Cyclenium has received a significant contribution from the National Research Council of Canada Industrial Research Assistance Program (NRC IRAP), a federally-funded program that supports small and medium-sized business and the commercialization of innovative Canadian technologies, while Haplogen Bioscience has been awarded a grant from the Austrian Research Promotion Agency, the country's national funding agency for industrial research and development.

Flaviviral infections cause a variety of clinical manifestations ranging from relatively mild rash and flu-like symptoms, to extremely serious diseases, such as encephalitis and hemorrhagic fever.

Cyclenium Pharma is an emerging, privately-held pharmaceutical research and development company that has translated its nearly two decades of pioneering experience, extensive knowledge base and unparalleled expertise in small molecule macrocyclic chemistry into the next generation CMRT drug discovery technology that addresses the shortcomings of earlier efforts in this increasingly important domain.

Haplogen Bioscience is a privately held biotechnology company in Vienna, Austria, with drug discovery programs to combat viral infectious and other diseases. Haplogen was founded in 2010 as a spin-out of CeMM, the Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.