Ascent Therapeutics is now Anchor Therapeutics

Ascent Therapeutics announced today that it has adopted a new name — Anchor Therapeutics. Anchor Therapeutics reflects the Company's core technology and its commitment to building solid, dependable value for patients, partners and investors via its proprietary platform technology.

“Since our founding in 2007, Anchor has successfully built and validated a strong foundation for novel drug development”

The Company's naturally derived lipopeptides, called pepducins, anchor in the cell membrane, then migrate through it to access and modulate G protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) on the inner membrane surface. Like the many types of nautical anchors, pepducins can be customized for various specialized purposes. Anchor's pepducin technology is a transformational approach to highly-specific GPCR targeting and has the potential to dramatically expand the range of addressable GPCR drug targets, including intractable and orphan receptors. GPCRs are critically involved in a wide variety of serious illnesses, including inflammation, cancer, pain, CNS disorders and metabolic and cardiovascular disease.

"Since our founding in 2007, Anchor has successfully built and validated a strong foundation for novel drug development," said Frederick Jones, President and CEO of Anchor. "We have secured a broad intellectual property portfolio, established a license option agreement with Novartis Option Fund and, in 2009, achieved in vivo proof of principle results for two of our pepducin drug candidates. We will continue to advance our internal programs into early trials, with the goal of partnering candidates as we establish clinical proof of concept."

Anchor completed their Series A funding with a syndicate of leading healthcare venture capital funds including Novartis Option Fund, Healthcare Ventures and TVM Capital.