Three Vancouver biotech companies marked significant milestones in a single week, and they all have one thing in common: all are working on treatments for cancer.
Zymeworks Inc. announced August 29 it has signed a $187 million contract with pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co. Inc. (NYSE:MRK) to conduct research on Azymetric, its proprietary antibody platform, which has potential applications in treating cancer and autoimmune diseases.
Two days later, Sirona Biochem Corp. (TSX.V:SBM) announced a “major advance” in stabilizing an antigen that could be used in a vaccine for a variety of cancers.
And on September 6, DelMar Pharmaceuticals, a private lab, announced it had been granted U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval to conduct Phase 2 clinical trials of VAL-083 – an old drug with potential new applications in cancer treatment.
“I would think that the BC Cancer Agency, and the University of British Columbia and the CDRD [Centre for Drug Research and Development] have really been magnets for good research, and that good research has led to the founding of promising young companies,” said DelMar CEO Jeffrey Bacha.
Bacha’s company is working on new applications for a drug that the National Cancer Institute in the U.S. spent $50 million on doing clinical trials, only to see it abandoned for other treatments.
New developments in molecular biology in the last decade are making it possible to refine the drug for new applications – DelMar has filed for patents for some of those new applications – and it is already in use in China for treating various types of cancer. Since the NCI and Chinese labs have already done much of the heavy lifting, DelMar does not face the same kind of monumental costs that companies must typically shoulder when they try to get a new drug approved.
“If you look at our potential costs from where we stand today to approval, we’d be looking at a cost of less than $15 million, as opposed to hundreds of millions if we were starting from the benchtop,” Bacha said.
DelMar is now looking for private financing to fund the trials. Sirona will also be looking for funding partners, but is at a much earlier stage in its research.
Sirona specializes in carbohydrate chemistry. It has two main products in the research stage: a sodium glucose transporter (SGLT) inhibitor for Type 2 diabetes and, more recently, a cancer antigen stabilizer.
The latter is a process it has developed in partnership with TFChem, a French lab that Sirona bought in March
It was while working on SGLT that Sirona and TFChem scientists realized Sirona’s stabilization process could be applied to a common cancer antigen.
“It’s a major breakthrough because it’s known that if you can stabilize this molecule, you’re going to have a tremendous potential antigen for the development of a new type of vaccine,” said Howard Verrico, Sirona Biochem’s founder and CEO.
The antigen in question, and its potential to fight cancer, is well known. The problem is that it is rapidly metabolized by the body, so it doesn’t persist long enough to prompt the immune system to produce cancer antigens.
Sirona is focusing on a process for making the antigen persist long enough to trigger antigens.
Verrico has a background in medicine and financing. An emergency room physician at Ridge Meadows Hospital in Maple Ridge, he is also a venture capitalist who has invested in a number of startups over the years, mostly in the resource sector. He and a number of other investors founded Sirona Biochem in 2007 and publicly listed it on the TSX Venture exchange in 2009. When the company realized that Sirona’s technology had applications in TFChem’s research, Sirona struck a licensing deal with the private French lab. Currently, Sirona’s and TFChem’s scientists are working toward providing in vitro proof that the antigen can be made to persist in the human body.
“Because this particular antigen is common in many forms of cancer, it has the potential to be used for a number of different cancers,” Verrico said. “In particular it seems more prevalent in cancers with higher malignancy potential [lung, prostate, breast, colon], which makes it very exciting.” •
