Empowered Patient Podcast Pioneering Anti-Inflammatory Therapeutics with Dr. Niels Riedemann InflaRx
Niels Riedemann, the CEO, Founder, and Executive Director of the Board of InflaRx, explains that InflaRx develops pioneering anti-inflammatory therapeutics against a specific portion of the complement cascade, a part of the body’s immune system that responds to infectious microbes. By applying its proprietary monoclonal anti-C5a and anti-C5aR technologies, InflaRx hopes to affect the progression of a wide variety of inflammatory diseases.
Niels explains, "Absolutely. So, I was a postdoc and research fellow at the University of Michigan and I researched this immune response I was talking about with another fellow in settings of sepsis of devastating, life-threatening inflammation and the other fellow and myself found it so intriguing that we ended up founding a company saying we're going to one day hopefully save people's lives with this approach by controlling this immune response. And when COVID came along, while we had a focus on other diseases and we have a key focus on devastating chronic diseases as well in the immune dermatological space and others, when COVID came along, we had all this knowledge and all this work in the immune response in life-threatening infections including in other viruses with our drug, for example, in an influenza type of virus. But we had not tested it, of course, in COVID or humans with this disease."
"We felt we had to do something about it. We were very sure that this was a potential lifesaving approach. So we ended up running what we believe is the largest global study, a one-to-one randomized placebo-controlled study that was powered to show a benefit, a survival benefit, in the most severely sick COVID-patients. And when I say most severely sick, I really mean patients that need invasive mechanical ventilation or even lung replacement therapy, also called ECMO. So that's our focus, and we ended up showing a survival benefit. We may be talking about this a bit today, but it’s an interesting story and a life endeavor. I should probably also mention that in order to better understand the other side of the research part, I became a physician, and I actually ran a large academic ICU in Germany for almost seven years, and also enrolled patients in trials. So, I know how it is as an intensive care physician to take care of patients when they're that devastatingly sick. The lots of motivations within the company, and we are really glad that we could bring this drug forward to help patients."