Australian, Cantrixil receives orphan drug designation for Ovarian Cancer

Australian drug discovery company, Novogen, announced that its subsidiary joint venture company with Yale University, CanTx, Inc, has received notification from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that its chemotherapy candidate drug, Cantrixil, has been granted Orphan Drug Designation for Ovarian Cancer.

Orphan Drug Designation is an important development for any experimental drug and has been instigated in a number of territories including the U.S, Europe and Australia to encourage the development of drugs for clinical indications that do not have a high incidence.

Cantrixil was granted Orphan Drug Designation under the U.S. Orphan drug Act following a review by the FDA of a package of pre-clinical data submitted by the Company.

Novogen and CanTx CEO, Graham Kelly, said, "Receiving this designation is one more step in our objective of bringing Cantrixil to market as a drug that we hope will provide meaningful clinical benefit to patients with Ovarian Cancer and deliver that long-sought breakthrough for patients with a cancer that has shown only slight improvement in 5-year survival rates over the last 30 years.

"CanTx came out of a belief by Yale University and some long-term Ovarian Cancer researchers in the Yale Medical School that Cantrixil represented a potential breakthrough in the treatment of ovarian cancer," Kelly added.