Histogen Inc. (HSTO), a clinical-stage therapeutics company focused on developing potential first-in-class clinical and preclinical small molecule pan-caspase and caspase selective inhibitors that protect the body’s natural process to restore immune function,  announced that the company has signed an exclusive license agreement with Johns Hopkins University. The intellectual property associated with this license covers the use of emricasan for the treatment of disease in humans resulting from viral or bacterial infections (including, but not limited to, MRSA, VRSA, and SARS-CoV-2). The license agreement with Johns Hopkins is an instrumental addition to Histogen’s intellectual property portfolio. Rights to these patent applications, together with recently issued internal patents, are expected to provide freedom to operate and exclusivity worldwide to the Histogen’s entire caspase inhibitor portfolio.

“We believe that emricasan has the potential to treat infections in a different way; by protecting the competence of the human body’s immune system thereby restoring the body’s natural process to combat invading organisms,” stated Steven J. Mento, President and CEO of Histogen. “The World Health Organization (WHO) names antibiotic resistance as one of the biggest threats facing humanity. By focusing on optimizing the immune response, we believe that we have an opportunity to provide emricasan as a viable treatment option for physicians without the risk of generating antibiotic resistance. We look forward to the anticipated initiation of clinical development activities using emricasan for the treatment of acute bacterial skin and skin structure infections (ABSSSI) in the second half of 2023,” concluded Dr. Mento.

As announced previously, emricasan improved symptoms in patients infected with COVD-19 potentially employing a similar mechanism of protecting the competence of the immune system. Patients in the placebo arm who completed the study showed either delay or no symptom resolution for the duration of the study.