Date: 2014-05-28
Type of information: R&D agreement
Compound: alpha fetoprotein drug conjugate
Company: PolyTherics (UK) Alpha Cancer Technologies (Canada)
Therapeutic area: Cancer - Oncology
Type agreement: collaboration R&D
Action mechanism:
Disease: ovarian cancer
Details: * On May 28, 2014, PolyTherics, an Abzena company that provides technologies and services to enable the development of better biopharmaceuticals, announced a collaboration with Alpha Cancer Technologies (“ACT”), a Canadian company with a targeted drug delivery platform based on alpha fetoprotein (“AFP”). PolyTherics will produce a range of AFP drug conjugates for ACT to test using its proprietary ThioBridge™ technology. ACT has developed a novel drug delivery system based on AFP, a shuttle protein that binds to AFP receptors, which are present in large amounts on the majority of cancer cells but only rarely on healthy cells. AFP has been studied extensively and has been shown to be safe in Phase I and II clinical studies involving over 400 patients. ACT’s lead product (ACT-901), which is in preclinical development, will use AFP initially to deliver paclitaxel to ovarian tumours.
PolyTherics has developed ThioBridge™ for site-specific conjugation of cytotoxic payloads to disulfide bonds in proteins and antibodies to provide more stable and less heterogeneous drug conjugates. Under the collaboration PolyTherics will conjugate AFP to a derivative of a known cytotoxic drug using ThioBridge™ to produce a range of different drug conjugates for testing.
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