Novogen lines up a double dose of funding

Novogen (ASX:NRT) has won approval from shareholders to raise funds to bring up to three drug candidates to the clinic and from a research foundation to find new treatments for a range of musculo-degenerative diseases.

The company’s shareholders yesterday voted overwhelmingly in favour of allowing Novogen to issue new shares, conversion shares and attaching warrants.

The approval will allow Novogen to raise up to $10 million through the issue of shares and potentially up to a further $10 million through the exercise of warrants, in addition to the up to $8 million already secured through a convertible securities deal with Hudson Bay Master Fund.

Proceeds from the issue will be put towards advancing up to three drugs to clinical trials, including ovarian cancer candidate Cantrixil, developed through the Novogen-Yale University joint venture CanTx.

The other candidates are Trilexium - under development for neural cancers including glioblastoma - and a candidate from Novogen’s anti-tropomyosin cancer drug program.

Novogen separately announced it has secured funding from the FSHD Global Research Foundation to support its efforts to develop treatments for musculo-degenerative diseases including facioscapulohumeral dystrophy (FSHD).

The company said it has created a separate division dedicated to pursuing neurodegenerative, musculo-degenerative and regenerative medicine therapeutic applications. The unit is called Operation Jacob Hope.

The research will be based on the recent discovery that Novogen’s super-benzopyran library has drugs with both the ability to modify the activity of tissue stem cells and to protect normal tissue from the toxic stresses of diseases.

“We designed the super-benzopyran compounds in order to create the first family of drugs capable of reaching back past regular cancer cells to their parent cells, the so-called tumour-initiating cancer cells,” Novogen CEO Dr Graham Kelly explained.

“In the course of those studies, we came to realise that the action of these drugs in killing cancer stem cells was more than just a blunt cytotoxic effect. It was part of a much more intricate mechanism of action that has to do with the ability of these compounds to control the growth and development of stem cells into their adult cell type.”

Funds provided by the foundation will be put towards the collaboration between Novogen and Genea Biocells, which has developed an accurate lab model of FSHD in the world using embryonic stem cells donated by FSHD-affected families.

Novogen (ASX:NRT) shares were trading unchanged at $0.135 as of around 9 am on Thursday.