New data on EHT 0202 for treatment of patients with AD presented at Geneva/Springfield Symposium

Mar 29 2010

“Forecasting the global burden of Alzheimer's disease”

• EHT 0202 responders have a specific gene expression profile
• Companion diagnostic could give early indication of responders

ExonHit Therapeutics (Paris:ALEHT) (Alternext: ALEHT) announced today that promising new data on EHT 0202, its lead candidate in Alzheimer's disease (AD), were presented at the 11^th International Geneva/Springfield Symposium on Advances in Alzheimer Therapy from March 24^th to March 27^th in Geneva, Switzerland.

The Geneva/Springfield Symposium focuses on the pharmacological therapy of Alzheimer's disease with particular emphasis on the discovery of new drugs.

"Identifying patients that will respond to a treatment before its initiation is an approach that will be increasingly used in the coming years. ExonHit has the technology necessary to developing biomarkers that will be the cornerstone of tomorrow's personalized medicine," said Loïc Maurel MD, President of the Management Board of ExonHit Therapeutics.

The EHT 0202 poster presentation reports preliminary results from a study designed to determine whether patients that responded best to EHT 0202, during the recently completed Phase IIa study, have a distinct blood-based gene expression profile. These data show that ExonHit's Genome-Wide SpliceArray™ expression profiling technology is able to clearly separate clinical patient subpopulations. Patients whose condition improved while on EHT 0202 have a different gene expression profile from those whose condition declined, and these gene expression profile differences are specific to EHT 0202. These data raise the possibility of identifying expression profiles that could allow the stratification of patients who will benefit from EHT 0202 therapy from those who won't prior to study initiation.

Applying this approach to other clinical development programs could significantly increase the likelihood of successfully achieving primary endpoints and could help identify the most relevant patient populations for a given therapeutic product.

A poster on AclarusDx™, ExonHit's first research-use-only molecular test for AD launched in December 2009, entitled "Identification of patients with Alzheimer's disease using molecular signatures derived from splice variant expression profiles from peripheral blood" was also presented.