Opthea
(ASX:OPT) has been granted a Chinese patent covering the company's OPT-302 molecule and related applications, including pharmaceutical compositions comprising OPT-302 and nucleic acid molecules that code for OPT-302. The patent extends to February 2034.
Other patents covering OPT-302 have already been granted in the United States, Europe, Japan, South Korea, Canada, Russia, Israel, Australia, Mexico, South Africa, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, New Zealand and Colombia.
Opthea is a $450m market cap biopharmaceutical company focused on improving vision. Its lead therapeutic, OPT-302, has the potential to address the needs of patients with wet age-related macular degeneration (the leading cause of vision loss in the developed world in people over the age of 50) and diabetic macular oedema (the leading cause of blindness in diabetics).
Opthea CEO Megan Baldwin comments, "China has a burgeoning biologics industry and expanding life sciences sector, and together with the promising evidence of efficacy of OPT-302 in patients with polypoidal choroidal vasculopathy, a difficult-to-treat wet AMD subtype predominant in Asian populations, we view patent coverage in China as strategically important to our commercialization plans for OPT-302.”
Shares in Opthea
(ASX:OPT) are trading 0.6 per cent higher at $1.28.
