Anagrelide patent for the United States

ALA today announced that the US Patent and Trademark Office has accepted its patent application covering its legacy asset, Anagrelide, and the patent will proceed to grant.

Anagrelide is part of ALA’s OroMist portfolio of treatments and the US patent comes in addition to existing patents in the EU, Japan and Australia.

While not part of our Key Objectives from our ALA Investment Memo, we did flag that legacy assets could play a role in reducing cash burn and help ALA focus on their iNKT Cell Therapy Platform and DKK1-CAR/mAb in our portfolio launch note.

Anagrelide may prove to be complementary to drugs called checkpoint inhibitors.

Two of these drugs, Keytruda (Merck, generated US$17B in revenue in 2021) and Opdivo (Bristol Myers Squibb, US$7.5B in revenue in 2021) are the dominant treatments.

We think the muted market reaction to today’s news is indicative of the limited interest in ALA’s legacy assets. As recent ALA investors, we are looking for ALA to piggyback on the larger market for checkpoint inhibitors and derive some revenue from these assets.

ALA stated it intends to pursue this:

“Arovella is actively seeking to find co-development partners to fund ongoing research or to out-licence the anagrelide intellectual property.”

Here is why we invested in ALA and what we expect it to achieve in 2022 - ALA Investment Memo.