Drug discovery company Beactica has secured a grant from the Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems (Vinnova) for the advancement of its LSD1 programme.
Beactica’s new programme aims to develop a new class of compounds with the potential to improve the existing treatment of glioblastoma.
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The aggressive brain tumour, with 40,000 annual cases in the EU and the US, is a fast-growing type of cancer and causes substantial patient suffering and associated societal costs.
The compounds developed in Beactica’s current project using the grant worth about $240,000, will regulate LSD1, a target protein shown to be relevant to treat several common cancers.
Beactica’s new and potent allosteric LSD1 modulators have a mechanism of action that is fundamentally different from the catalytic LSD1 inhibitors that are currently undergoing clinical testing.
Beactica CEO Dr Per Källblad said: “Our unique approach has the potential to help cancer patients with an extremely poor prognosis.
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By GlobalData“This grant will help us advance discussions with leading pharmaceutical companies, and our goal is to sign a licence agreement with a strong partner that can stake out a clinical path for this potential first-in-class therapeutic.”
As announced earlier this year, the company is partnering with professor Bengt Westermark and colleagues at Uppsala University and SciLifeLab in Uppsala to study the effects of these compounds on cancer stem cells.
With the funds awarded from Vinnova, the LSD1 programme will be able to progress to the point where Beactica can report data from in vivo proof-of-principle glioblastoma models.
The company will also evaluate efficacy in other cancer forms that currently have no treatments.
LSD1 functions as an epigenetic eraser removing histone methyl marks, and also as a scaffolding protein in suppressor and promoter complexes, both affecting gene transcription.
