The company will fund an in vitro bladder cancer study at the University of Virginia that will collect data by upregulating the Senesco’s Factor 5A gene in a human bladder cancer cell line. In this way, Senesco hopes to learn if its technology can kill bladder cancer cells. Bladder cancer affects approximately 60,000 new patients in the US each year.
It is also hoped by Senesco that research will prove the technology beneficial to a variety of inflammatory diseases by reducing premature cell death through its Factor 5A inhibition system.
A funded research agreement will also begin at the University of Pittsburgh, in which the company’s technology will be used in an inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) model in mice. IBD affects approximately one million people in the US and is a chronic disease characterized by inflammation of the intestinal lining.
“We are quite pleased that we are able to work with research institutions of this caliber to help us generate preclinical data for our technology,” stated Dr John Thompson, Senesco’s chief scientific officer. “These preclinical in vitro and in vivo studies are important steps in testing our technology’s efficacy in human disease models.”