NervGen Pharma Corp. announced it has entered into a Memorandum of Understanding with Shirley Ryan AbilityLab with the intention of performing NervGen's first clinical trial with the Company's proprietary NVG-291 in spinal cord injury (SCI) patients. The single site clinical trial, which is expected to start in the second half of 2022, will be a placebo-controlled trial, assessing the safety and efficacy of NVG-291 in treating acute/subacute (<3 months post-injury) and chronic (=1 year post-injury) patients.

In two independent animal studies published in Nature and Experimental Neurology, NVG-291 treatment resulted in significant recovery in mobility and/or bladder function, despite experiencing a debilitating spinal cord injury. NVG-291 is based on the ground breaking discovery by Dr. Jerry Silver at Case Western Reserve University of a class of molecules (chondroitin sulfate proteoglycans, or CSPGs) that are upregulated in response to nervous system damage and that inhibit repair. NVG-291 was designed to bypass this inhibition by CSPGs, thereby enhancing the body's natural repair mechanisms, including plasticity, regeneration and remyelination.