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767,492
2024-02-01 to 2026-01-31
Collaborative R&D
Gene therapy medicines have been approved for numerous rare diseases in the last decade. Most use a harmless AAV virus to replace mutated genes in specific diseased tissues (e.g. liver delivery for haemophilia). Gene therapy approaches also have great potential for the treatment of cancer, but this has not been straightforward, due to delivery issues and inappropriate choice of anti-cancer payloads. How can we get combinations of anti-cancer therapeutics targeted specifically to cancer cells without toxicities to normal tissues? To address this, we've developed a novel technology that enables us to switch on multiple therapeutic payloads with exquisite precision only within the cancer cells. By delivering the virus broadly to the tumour and surrounding tissues, we rely on our selective activation through artificial gene switches (termed synthetic super-enhancers) that trigger the payloads activity (expression) only in the cancer cells. Importantly, our strategy also results in potent activation of the natural anti-cancer immune response which is lying dormant in most patients. This is a form of immunotherapy. Our initial focus is aggressive brain cancers. Using the latest advanced experimental models, we've shown that tumours can be completely cleared. This strategy resembles a Trojan Horse manoeuvre: delivering a combination of killing and immune-activated payloads from within the cancer cells themselves, which results in the immune system being educated and eradicating of all residual cancer cells. The approach has yielded remarkable results in animal models, eradicating sizeable brain tumours with no signs of toxicity and no signs of relapse. Although brain tumours are a significant cause of cancer-related deaths in those under 40, they are one of the hardest cancers to treat, and hence it is considered a high-risk proposal to focus on GBM as a single indication for company creation. To advance our innovative AAV lead product, we must therefore derisk and increment the value of the commercial model by expanding the pipeline of cancer indications. We've identified liver cancer and colorectal liver metastases cancer as priorities for new product development. Now is the right time to gain the additional investment needed to advance these programs quickly forward to full preclinical efficacy studies. These additional programs and investments will help Trogenix expand rapidly providing confidence in the SSE technology, and expanding our bioinformatics platform while enabling us to tackle three different cancers in parallel by performing the critical proof of concept studies before moving to the clinic.