BioAlliance Pharma obtains E6.4m funding from OSEO

BioAlliance Pharma, a specialty pharmaceutical company, has received E6.4m in funding from OSEO, the French state innovation agency. The company will devote the funds to the development of its novel therapeutic entities for the treatment of invasive cancers.

The funding has been awarded to the ‘cancer anti-invasive program’ (CAP) private-public consortium as part of OSEO’s strategic industrial innovation scheme. The consortium led by BioAlliance Pharma comprises two SMEs (Oroxcell and Xentech), two mid-sized companies (Novasep and CIT) – all of which will make project investments – and two academic centers of excellence (the Ecole Normale Superieure de Cachan and the Institut Gustave Roussy). The consortium’s total budget over five years is E9.9 million, including a number of grants-in-aid and repayable advances.

The collaborative program will enable the development of two therapeutic products up to the commercialization phase: Amep, a biotherapy indicated in invasive melanoma, and an anticancer drug that targets invasive cancers and makes tumor cells revert to a normal phenotype.

In parallel, the consortium will develop innovative animal models of invasive cancers with Xentech, highly predictive genotoxicity tests with Oroxcell and immunotoxicology tools with CIT. Novasep will develop an R&D-phase pilot facility for generating highly potent active ingredients. In collaboration with BioAlliance Pharma, the academic centers of excellence will identify new markers for monitoring tumor invasion.

Dominique Costantini, president and CEO of BioAlliance Pharma, said: This is a significant amount of public funding and constitutes a major boost for the clinical development of two of our high-added-value projects. All the consortium partners have committed to infrastructure investments and the program will provide highly innovative support for an industrial drug development pipeline.