Swedish TLA Immunotherapies, which recently signed a develeopment and licensing deal with Ferring Pharmaceuticals, has recruited Annette Brus to further speed up their market launch.

The company has developed a technical platform for immunological diseases and the new recruitment, Annette Brus, will be leading the clinical trials. She has been working within the pharmaceutical industry for almost 30 years and the last 25 years, with different kinds of clinical trials at for example Pharmacia, Janssen, Merck-Serono, SentoClone and most recently, Quintiles.

“I look forward to by finding the right areas of indication and patients for the clinical trials create a platform to reach market in a safe and effeicient waty,” says Annette Brus.

Targeted Immuno Therapies AB (TLA) was founded at Karolinska Institutet in 2005 and has developed a technology platform for the treatment of inflammatory diseases. TLA has won a number of prestigious awards, such as the Universal Biotech Innovation Prize and Sweden’s Athenapriset (the Athena Prize). A very successful study of IBD was conducted during 2014. The technology is based on a discovery of Professor Ola Winqvist at Karolinska University Hospital.

The strategic collaboration agreement with Ferring Pharmaceuticals in January, granted Ferring worldwide rights (excluding China) to TLA’s discovery of a new, novel treatment for IBD. The newly discovered and proprietary technology works by removing harmful cells from the patient’s blood, thereby re-establishing a positive balance of the patient’s immune system. Patients are referred to their hospital to be treated ambulatory with a modified version of leukapheresis (or blood-exchange). The patient’s own blood is pumped through a column containing a specifically designed and proprietary peptide chemokine that removes the specific cells that are known to cause damage in inflammatory diseases.

A proof-of-principle clinical study, completed in 2015, with severely affected ulcerative colitis patients gave some promising results. The inflamed gut mucosa healed in more than half of the patients and this was linked to a significant reduction of the circulating pro-inflammatory cells. A confirmatory clinical study in severe ulcerative colitis patients is now being planned as the next step.