Liège, Belgium, 18 January 2017 – Mithra Pharmaceuticals (Euronext Brussels: MITRA), a company focused on women’s health, today announces that the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has issued a Notice of Allowance for U.S. Application Serial Number 14/238,310, a patent which covers the use of Estetrol (E4) as an emergency contraceptive.
The patent specifically covers E4, a naturally occurring estrogen, as a potential new emergency contraception option where E4 is used alone. This new method differs from currently approved emergency contraceptives which include progestin only pills and combined estrogen-progestin pills.
Professor Jean-Michel Foidart, Scientific Comittee Member: “The unique profile of E4 has been widely supported by academia and leading international institutions, including the University of Toulouse, the University of Rennes, the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Notably it has been demonstrated in academic studies that E4 can activate estrogen receptors in some tissues while in other tissues it acts as an anti-estrogen due to its ability to activate the nuclear estrogen receptor and to block the membrane estrogen receptor1. The inhibition of the membrane estrogen receptor has been shown to play a key role in suppressing ovulation. This was shown in a study carried out by Adlanmerini et al. in 2014 who demonstrated that transgenic mice with inactivating mutation of the membrane estrogen receptor did not ovulate2. This further supports E4’s potential as an emergency contraceptive option.”
Francois Fornieri, CEO of Mithra Pharmaceuticals, said: “With an improved safety profile compared to the current generation of estrogens, E4 has the potential to revolutionalize the contraceptive market. This patent allowance further strengthens our US intellectual property position and we look forward to further developing E4 in emergency oral contraceptive applications.”
