Arrien Pharmaceuticals Founder's closes $2.0 Million Series A Financing

ANSONIA, Conn., Sept. 12, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Arrien Pharmaceuticals LLC (Arrien) is a new start-up Company located in the Connecticut & Salt Lake City area announces today of its successful completion of Series A financing from contributions by the founders of the company and currently engaged in the discovery and development of breakthrough novel small molecules targeting cell signalling pathways. Arrien developed a proprietary platform - Fragment-Field Drug Design (FFDD™) Technology with the efforts of experienced Medicinal Chemists and initiated to discover small molecule targeted therapeutics for addressing unmet need in treating Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, Down's syndrome, Huntington's, Multiple Cancer Indications, Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA), Type 2 Diabetes and Obesity diseases.

ORS-1006 is the Company's lead small molecule First-in-Class candidate inhibitor of Protein Kinase for Parkinson Disease (PD). ORS-1006 shows neuroptotective effect in cell culture models of PD, potent activity in Parkinsonian mouse models, kinase selective and has demonstrated an excellent PK profile. Arrien completed early pre-clinical PK/PD studies, IND-enabling toxicology studies for ORS-1006, which included Maximum Tolerated Dose (MTD) studies and repeat-dose toxicity studies in rodents and non-rodents is expected to start by Q4 2011.

In addition, Arrien has identified an active First-in-Class ARN-1032 and ARN-3016 which are potent inhibitors of protein kinases and demonstrated potent anticancer activities in a variety of cancer cell lines. Currently Arrien is conducting lead optimization process and early PK studies.

Mr. Rajendra P. Appalaneni Chairman/CEO, an experienced Chemist/Pharmacist/Pharmacologist, Successful Serial Entrepreneur and The Founder/Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Arrien Pharmaceuticals commented at the Arrien board meeting on completion of this financing to advance Arrien promising pre-clinical Parkinson's disease lead candidate ORS-1006 into IND enabling studies.

Commenting on the announcement, Dr. Hariprasad Founder/Scientific Advisory Board Member had more than 16 years of experience stated "we are delighted that the Arrien combines with the team of Business Entrepreneurs, Medicinal Chemists with an early discovery & development expertise and Arrien's discovery pipeline could contribute substantially to the future therapeutics."

Arrien Pharmaceuticals is working for a possible licensing & alliance deals for near term funding securities to expand significantly to its value based pipeline. Arrien is seeking collaborations with companies for a number of programs for which it expects to file 2 INDs between Q4 2011-12 related to protein kinase mediated Parkinson's, Cancer and other disease indications.

About Arrien Pharmaceuticals & FFDD™

Arrien Pharmaceuticals LLC is a small molecule targeted therapeutics drug discovery and development company working towards targeting cell signaling pathways - A target class in treating Neurodegenerative/CNS, Cancer, Inflammation and Metabolic diseases. Arrien proprietary Fragment-Field Design (FFD) Technology™ typically involves scaffold-based design strategy; extensively implemented by utilizing structural biology data inputs and to assist Medicinal Chemistry in early phase of lead-to-drug-lead identification process along with its target focused scaffold-like libraries to design new lead candidates within various families of protein kinase drug targets. Arrien cost-competent approach assists its technology to influence target-specific leads for multiple protein targets. Moreover, Arrien technology has proven in the identification of potent and highly selective protein kinase inhibitors.  

For further information on Arrien Pharmaceuticals, please visit the company's website www.arrienpharma.com.

SOURCE Arrien Pharmaceuticals LLC