Date: 2011-03-10
Type of information: R&D agreement
Compound: drugs to block a DNA repair target which may play a role in cancer cell survival
Company: Cancer Research Technology (UK) The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) (UK) ZoBio BV (the Netherlands)
Therapeutic area: Cancer Oncology
Type agreement: R&D
Action mechanism: Potential drugs developed through the new collaboration would block one of the remaining alternative repair routes. DNA damage occurs during each cell division. If DNA damage is allowed to accumulate, cells will stop dividing and may eventually die. Healthy cells use several different routes to identify and repair DNA damage. But cancer cells, which divide rapidly and accumulate more DNA damage, often have faults with a major DNA repair process. They are forced to rely on \
Disease: cancer
Details: Cancer Research Technology (CRT) and The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) have signed a deal with ZoBio BV, to discover and develop drugs to block a DNA repair target which may play a role in cancer cell survival. CRT will manage commercialisation arising from any potential drug compounds discovered through the collaboration and will share a portion of future revenues with ZoBio and the ICR. The collaboration will combine the ICR’s expertise in drug discovery and target validation - proving a protein’s importance as a therapeutic target - with ZoBio’s patented drug fragment screening technology called TINS (Target Immobilised Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Screening platform. TINS is a proprietary technology that combines the robust NMR approach with extreme sensitivity to very weak interactions such as those between a drug fragment and a target), to identify small molecules that bind to and block the DNA repair target. It is also expected that these drugs would increase the effectiveness of common chemotherapies, which work by causing more DNA damage than cancer cells can repair. Healthy cells could tolerate this type of drug as they divide more slowly and retain their main repair machinery which provides effective DNA repair.
The project started as a collaboration between Professor Alan Ashworth from the Breakthrough Breast Cancer Research Centre at the ICR, who completed initial validation studies, and Professor Paul Workman from the Cancer Research UK Cancer Therapeutics Unit at the ICR, who will lead the drug discovery programme.
Financial terms: Financial terms were not disclosed.
Latest news:
