Australia-based Cancer Therapeutics CRC (CTx) has collaborated with Duke University, North Carolina, USA (Duke) for the discovery and development of new drugs to treat many forms of cancer, based on research undertaken by the laboratory of Duke Professor Patrick Casey.
Professor Casey and his team at Duke have been investigating lipid signalling pathways and the role of lipid metabolising enzymes in cancer for many years and have developed a series of new inhibitors of these enzymes. CTx has taken an exclusive license to these inhibitors and will initiate a drug development program to bring these early stage compounds toward the clinic.
This is in addition to CTx’s international collaborations, facilitated by its commercial partner Cancer Research Technology of the UK and its US subsidiary Cancer Research Technology Inc.
CTx’s CEO Tony Evans said that collaborating with an academic medical centre of Duke’s calibre is a major expansion of CTx’s capabilities in partnering with overseas cancer researchers in order to source the most promising novel targets for CTx’s drug discovery projects.
Cancer Therapeutics CRC has been formed through collaboration between a number of Australia’s research institutions and commercial organisations for the purposes of cancer drug discovery and development.
The objective of the company, which is funded under the Australian Government’s CRC scheme, is to take novel molecular targets or early stage compounds from research institutes or biotech companies, undertake hit discovery, hit to lead development and lead optimisation, produce high quality pre-clinical trial candidates for further development through commercialisation.