Nymox Developing New Drug Candidates for the Treatment of Alzheimer's Disease.

Business Editors & Health/Medical Writers

MAYWOOD, N.J.--(BW HealthWire)--March 13, 2001

Nymox Pharmaceutical Corporation (NASDAQ: NYMX) announced today that it is increasing its development efforts in the areas of diagnosing and treating Alzheimer's disease, the leading cause of dementia among the elderly.

This is National Brain Awareness Week (March 12 -18) across the United States, Canada and Europe. Brain Awareness Week is an annual public information campaign sponsored by the Society for Neuroscience in conjunction with the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives and designed to raise public awareness of brain and nervous system research.

Nymox has two principal development programs aimed at Alzheimer's disease, both based on original research into the possible causes of this terminal brain disease. The findings illustrate how basic research in neuroscience can lead to promising new drug treatments for Alzheimer's disease and new diagnostic tools for physicians.

The first program targets spherons, tiny dense balls of protein found in the brains of everyone from age one. Spherons are the only normal new brain structure visible through the light microscope found in the last century. The fact that they are not visible by the most routine neuroscience methods may have contributed to their surprisingly late characterization.

Nymox researchers believe that spherons are the principal source of the senile plaques, the characteristic abnormality found in abundance in crucial areas of the brains of patients with Alzheimer's disease and widely believed to play a pivotal role in the cause and course of the illness. The researchers found that, as we grow older, spherons enlarge until they can no longer be held by their brain cells. When they reach their maximum size of 5 to 10 microns in diameter, they burst, creating the senile plaques and setting off a cascade of cellular damage and biochemical changes that are instrumental to the symptoms and signs of Alzheimer's disease.

In 1998, Nymox researchers summarized their findings linking spherons to senile plaques and Alzheimer's disease in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease and Drug News & Perspectives. These summaries set forth 20 important criteria of validity correlating the disappearance of spherons in old age with the appearance of senile plaques and implicating spherons as a significant cause of Alzheimer's disease. In 2000, an international group of researchers from the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom published further findings in Alzheimer Reports (2000; 3: 177-184) confirming that spherons contain key proteins that are also known to be in senile plaques and showing that, like senile plaques, spherons contain unusually old proteins in terms of the human body's metabolism, with an average age of 20 to 40 years.

Nymox researchers believe that stopping or inhibiting the transformation of spherons into senile plaques will stop or slow the progress of this devastating disease. They extracted spherons from human brain tissue and developed novel, proprietary drug screening methodologies and promising new drug candidates based on spherons.

Nymox's second Alzheimer's disease drug development program targets a brain protein called neural thread protein (NTP) which is elevated early in Alzheimer's disease as reported both in the scientific literature and at scientific conferences. Researchers at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Brown University led by Doctors Suzanne de la Monte and Jack Wands first found large amounts of the protein in the brains of patients known to have died with Alzheimer's disease. Subsequent research at Harvard and Brown led to the characterization of NTP and the gene that produces it. Nymox succeeded in developing a highly sensitive test to detect the presence of NTP in the spinal fluid and, most recently, in the urine of patients with Alzheimer's disease.

To date, many independent studies published in peer-reviewed scientific publications or presented at scientific conferences have confirmed the accuracy of NTP as a marker for Alzheimer's disease. These publications include, for example, the Journal of Neuropathology and Experimental Neurology (1996; vol. 55: 1038-1050), Journal of Clinical Investigation (1997; vol.100; pages 3093-3104), Journal of Contemporary Neurology (1998; art. 4a), Journal of Clinical Laboratory Analysis (1998; vol.12: 223-226) and (1998; vol.12: 285-288), Alzheimer's Reports (1999; vol.2: 327-332) and (2000; vol.3: 177-184), and Neurology (2000; vol. 54: 1498-1504).

Nymox is currently marketing a clinical reference laboratory test, known as AlzheimAlert(TM), that detects elevated levels of NTP in the urine of patients with Alzheimer's disease. The results of this unique and accurate urine test can assist a physician faced with the task of diagnosing whether a patient has Alzheimer's disease. Nymox offers the test at a cost of $295 through its reference laboratory in Maywood, New Jersey.

Based on the research that led to the discovery of NTP and evidence linking NTP to the cell loss found in Alzheimer's disease, Nymox has also developed a unique drug screening system to identify other potential drug candidates for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease. These potential drug candidates are aimed to reduce or prevent the cell loss associated with high levels of NTP. Recently, Dr. Suzanne de la Monte and Dr. Jack Wands of Brown University published the results of a series of experiments in the February, 2001, issue of the Journal of Neuropathology and Experimental Neurology (Vol. 60, No.2, pp. 195-207), a prestigious peer-reviewed medical journal, which provided further evidence of the key role played by NTP in Alzheimer's disease. The researchers implanted the gene that produces NTP in nerve cells derived from humans. They then induced the cells to turn on the NTP gene and to begin producing NTP in elevated quantities. This caused a marked increase in nerve cell death. Sophisticated analysis showed that the cells died in a programmed fashion similar to the way the nerve cells in brains of patients with Alzheimer's disease die. Extensive loss of brain cells and accompanying brain shrinkage is a key part of the Alzheimer's disease process.

Nymox Pharmaceutical Corporation has facilities in Montreal and Maywood, NJ. Its stock is traded on NASDAQ with the symbol NYMX. More information is available at http://www.nymox.com.

This press release contains certain "forward-looking statements" as defined in the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 that involve a number of risks and uncertainties. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate and the actual results and future events could differ materially from management's current expectations. Such factors are detailed from time to time in Nymox's filings with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission and other regulatory authorities.