Phylonix receives $1.1M grant from NIH

The USA's Phylonix Pharmaceuticals has been awarded a $1.1-million Phase II Small Business Innovation Grant from the National Eye Institute of the US National Institutes of Health, to develop zebrafish eye disease models for drug screening. The grant will support the Phylonix program over a period of three years.

"The funding for this program will be used to further develop our novel, patent pending methods for modeling eye diseases and to identify potential drug candidates," said Patricia McGrath, Phylonix' chief executive. "Our preliminary data show good correlation between results in zebrafish and results in mammals and we are very pleased to receive this Phase II SBIR award from the National Eye Institute," she added.

Phylonix is modeling a number of eye diseases in zebrafish including diabetic retinopathy and age-related macular degeneration, the two leading causes of blindness in adults in the industrialized world. Both conditions involve vascular abnormalities, proliferation and leakage of new blood vessels. Other eye diseases resulting in blindness that the US firm is modeling in zebrafish include retinopathy of prematurity, a major cause of newborn blindness in premature infants maintained by oxygen supplementation during the postnatal period. This disease involves intense neovascularization of the retina and leads to retinal detachment.