Following on the heels of a financial report noting a net loss of nearly $3 million for the fiscal quarter ending Oct. 31, yesterday Alfacell Corporation announced the resignation of its president, CFO and corporate secretary Lawrence Kenyon. In a release published by TradingMarkets.com, the company says Mr. Kenyon will remain on the board of directors, and will continue to lead the company until at least Jan. 31, 2009, although he has accepted a full-time position with Par Pharmaceutical, where he will be executive VP of finance.

Alfacell said it also is implementing a plan to reduce or eliminate non-essential personnel and development costs so that it can focus entirely on efforts to complete a rolling New Drug Application (NDA) for ONCONASE, its mesothelioma drug. As we reported last week, Alfacell has a pre-NDA meeting with the U.S. Food & Drug Administration at the end of January 2009 to move ONCONASE forward.

ONCONASE is for patients with unresectable malignant mesothelioma, targeting those who have failed one prior chemotherapy regimen. Results of the drug’s Phase IIIb clinical trial showed “significant improvement” for patients in this category treated with ONCONASE.

According to Alfacell information, ONCONASE works by triggering apoptosis, the natural death of cells, through use of the company’s proprietary ribonuclease (RNase) technology.

An Associated Press report says Kenyon will replace Par Pharmaceutical’s CFO Veronica Lubatkin, whose departure will be effective March 6, 2009. Par is a generic-drug manufacturer.

Tags: Alfacell Corporation, Lawrence Kenyon, mesothelioma, ONCONASE

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 16th, 2008 at 12:01 pm and is filed under News, Research/Treatment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.