Cardior Pharmaceuticals GmbH

Cardior is a privately held clinical stage biopharmaceutical company founded 2016 by Prof. Thomas Thum (CSO) and Dr. Claudia Ulbrich (CEO) as a spin-off from Hannover Medical School. A Series A financing round of 15 Mio. € was closed in May 2017 with five international leading venture capital funds including LSP, BioMedPartners, Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund, Bristol-Myers Squibb and High-Tech Gründerfonds.

Technology
The company is dedicated to becoming a world-leader in design, research and development of noncoding
RNA based therapeutics and diagnostics for cardiovascular diseases. These non-coding RNAs
are a novel class of regulatory RNAs and have huge therapeutic potential.

As its lead compound CDR Cardior is developing an anti-sense oligonucleotide as therapeutic to inhibit
a specific non-coding RNA in the heart controlling cardiac growth, autophagy and contractility. Its
inhibition reverses cardiac remodeling, restores normal cardiac function and can revolutionize the
treatment of patients with myocardial infarction-induced as well as chronical heart failure.

Besides the patent protected lead compound Cardior has access to a large patent portfolio consisting
of several candidates for heart failure therapy and other indications, e.g. kidney fibrosis.

Unmet medical need
New innovative treatments of heart failure are scarce, even among those that are in early phases of
development. But with this novel approach Cardior’s clear advantage is having a well-characterized
target with convincing preclinical efficacy and safety data leading to a superior approach for the
treatment of patients with heart failure.

Indeed, and in contrast to standard of care or other therapeutics in development, which are mainly
symptomatic or disease-halting, Cardior’s innovative strategy is designed as the first real curative
approach for heart failure.

Development lead compound
Within only two years Cardior has advanced from research to clinical stage. The company’s lead
compound CDR has shown preclinical proof-of-concept and started a clinical phase 1b trial in June
2019. After proof-of-concept (POC) data and clinical validation Cardior seeks to market its lead
compound in collaboration with a big pharma partner.

Furthermore, Cardior works on innovative cardiac delivery technologies enabling a safe cardiac specific
long-term treatment for patients with chronic heart failure. This tool offers the possibility to acquire
precise data on the patient’s disease-specific status and to tailor an individual treatment-plan.

Beyond that, Cardior develops a companion diagnostic to provide a tool predicting the future outcome
of patients with myocardial infarction.