GeneCentric Therapeutics, Inc. today announced that the company has acquired an exclusive license from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to technology for subtyping Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma. The company plans to advance the technology to identify responder populations to emerging therapeutics for the treatment of PDAC in collaboration with pharmaceutical partners, UNC and other researchers. Financial terms were not disclosed.
“The license will expand our portfolio of high resolution, genomic-defined cancer subtypes that have the potential to function as universal biomarkers for drug response,” said Dr. Myla Lai-Goldman, CEO/Co-Founder of GeneCentric. “Pancreatic cancer is among the most lethal tumor types. The subtyping platform has significant potential to guide the development and eventual clinical use of promising therapeutic agents in this disease.”
The licensed technology, called Purity Independent Subtyping of Tumors, was developed in the Laboratory of Jen Jen Yeh, MD, Professor of Surgery and Pharmacology and Vice Chair for Research, Department of Surgery at UNC School of Medicine and the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. The technology is based on set of patient-cell derived gene signatures for classifying four pancreatic subtypes. Early data in recent studies published in Clinical Cancer Research (March 15, 2018) suggest that response to chemotherapeutic drugs differs among patients with different genomic/transcriptomic subtypes.
“Having dedicated such considerable effort to developing this novel PDAC profiling technology, it is deeply gratifying to begin progressing it to potential clinical and therapeutic application,” said Dr. Yeh, “Advancing novel technologies such as this to predict disease progression and treatment response can accelerate the development of novel therapeutic approaches to extend and improve the lives of people with PDAC.”
Want to publish your own articles on DistilINFO Publications?
Send us an email, we will get in touch with you.
PDAC is the 11th most common cancer type with an estimated 55,000 new cases in the US in 2018, according to the American Cancer Society. While PDAC represents three percent of all cancers, the disease accounts for seven percent of all cancer deaths. Five year-survival is 8.5 percent.
Date: October 1, 2018
Source: Bizjournals
