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news.RXi Pharmaceuticals has received a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for the discovery and preclinical development of sd-rxRNAs to treat retinoblastoma, a pediatric ocular malignancy.
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David Cobrinik and his colleagues at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center will carry on the clinical studies.
The $300,000 grant spread over six months will be used to evaluate sd-rxRNAs efficacy in in vivo models of retinoblastoma and to develop the compounds to silence one or more targets critical to retinoblastoma cell growth and survival.
Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center senior research scientist David Cobrinik said prior studies performed by RXi and its collaborators at the University of Massachusetts demonstrated that self-delivering sd-rxRNAs can penetrate the retina and regulate retinal gene expression.
”This SBIR award will enable us to test this hypothesis, possibly extending the application of sd-rxRNAs from ophthalmic diseases to the cancer setting," Cobrinik added.
RXi Pharmaceuticals chief development officer Pamela Pavco said, "We are honored to have the opportunity to collaborate with the team at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, and are very pleased to have received financial support from the NCI to further the development of our novel RNAi compounds as potential therapeutics for ocular cancer."