Deal offers hope of ‘tailor-made’ cancer drugs

A UNIVERSITY has signed a licensing agreement with a new Irish biotech company to develop ‘tailor-made’ drugs that could give new hope to cancer patients.

University College Cork (UCC) was due to announce the deal with Cork-based Lee Oncology Ltd this morning.

It will involve the commercial development of potential new cancer drugs developed by a UCC research group led by Professor Anita Maguire, the director of the university’s Analytical and Biological Chemistry Research Facility.

It is hoped that clinical trials of the drugs, which may reduce the side effects associated with current treatments, could begin within three years.

The global market for cancer drugs is estimated at €51 billion. Pending the outcome of stringent regulatory tests on the potential new drugs, a licensing deal with a pharmaceutical company could be worth hundreds of millions of euro to the university and Lee Oncology.

The research project began when a scientific team, led by Lee Oncology’s Dr Finbarr Murphy, created a unique series of genetically engineered human cell lines that recreate the “faulty wiring” found inside cancer cells.

These engineered cells were then used to search chemical libraries for molecules that can fight cancer.

Professor Maguire’s team then worked on some of these molecules to improve their suitability for development as drugs.

The resulting technology, which has been licensed to Lee Oncology, comprises several sets of compounds which can block the so- called signal pathways – the growth paths followed by tumours.

Dr Colin Telfer, the founder and director of Lee Oncology, said: “Cancer is slowly moving from being a terrible and acute condition to one that can be better managed.

“What we hope to do is develop a tailored treatment for individual patients.

“We will work out at a biological level what’s gone wrong, allowing clinicians to select the best drug for the particular patient’s cancer.”

Lee Oncology has secured Enterprise Ireland funding and is in talks with investors to support its research.

UCC President Dr Michael Murphy said the licensing deal was further evidence of UCC’s commitment to the innovation agenda and its strengths in developing technologies relevant to industry.

Dr John Harris, an international expert in this area of chemistry and a non-executive director responsible for medicinal chemistry at Lee Oncology, said: “We are delighted to gain access to these high-quality anti-cancer compound series, confident that we can develop them rapidly into promising drug candidates that physicians and their patients so urgently require.”

Lee Oncology was founded by Dr Telfer and Dr Finbarr Murphy in October 2008 as a spin-out from UCC. Based at UCC’s Western Gateway Incubation Centre, it works on the development of targeted drugs to treat colorectal, lung, breast and prostate cancer.