New patents filed to protect Poolbeg disease prediction platform

Clinical-stage infectious disease pharmaceutical company Poolbeg Pharma updated the market on new patent filings for its ‘PredictViral’ platform - which estimates disease severity and contagiousness in people who are recently infected with a respiratory virus - on Thursday.

The AIM-traded firm said that, expanding on its existing PredictViral intellectual property, a number of patent applications had been submitted in the UK aiming to protect a method of predicting whether an individual exposed to a respiratory virus, such as flu, RSV or hRV, would have a higher severity of disease or be more likely to be contagious.

It said it would continue to focus on expanding its intellectual portfolio as required.

Poolbeg said hVIVO, part of Open Orphan, filed the predictive biomarker patent applications on behalf of Poolbeg.

As agreed as part of the demerger process and outlined in Poolbeg's admission document, ownership would ultimately reside with Poolbeg, which would continue to commercialise the platform.

That, it said, would provide clinicians with a risk score for recently-infected patients who were likely to experience a severe form of disease.

Identifying viral infections early and triaging patients based on likely severity was “vitally important” in optimising clinical outcomes, Poolbeg explained, and could be “particularly important” in diseases such as influenza, where there was a limited window for successful treatment early in the disease.

“Protecting the intellectual property for such an innovative disease severity platform as PredictViral is important and key to our strategy of commercialising this cutting-edge technology,” said chief executive officer Jeremy Skillington.

“PredictViral will provide valuable information for assessing the best course of treatment for viral disease.

“It has the potential to help early interventions when needed and to reduce the spread of disease, even amongst those who are unaware they are infected - the importance of which has become very clear during the Covid-19 global pandemic.”

At 1548 BST, shares in Poolbeg Pharma were up 2.24% at 10.48p.