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By Biocat

Catalan biotechnology firm Argon Pharma, located in the Barcelona Science Park (PCB), will lead the European WispATDrug project to develop oral antitumor drugs mainly for orphan diseases like pancreatic cancer. It also aims to find treatments with better toxicity profiles in more appropriate doses that improve patient quality of life.

WispATDrug (for Lead optimization for innovative, orally bioavailable wide spectrum antitumor drugs) will be carried out over the coming three years with a budget of €1.5 millions funded through Eurotransbio (European Union 7th Framework Program). In addition to Argon Pharma, the international consortium of companies will also include ElexoPharm GmbH, PharmBioTec GmbH and Pharmacelsus of Germany and Admescope from Finland. "We have created a strong, capable, private consortium of biotechnology SMEs with complementary knowledge in research and optimizing new drug candidates, particularly in areas like rational drug design, medical chemistry, detection technology and screening new hits and ADME/toxicity", explains Ramón Roca, CEO of Argon Pharma.

The Rare Cancers Europe campaign affirms that more than 4 million Europeans are affected by one of these orphan oncology diseases. They are cases with an unmet medical need. WispATDrug, however, will also carry out research related with more common oncology diseases like colon cancer.

The innovative aspect of the project lies in the way it proposes to fight cancer: based on inhibiting a tumor action mechanism that causes cell death (apoptosis). Thus getting rid of cancerous cells without affecting healthy ones, which remain intact.

Argon Pharma, created in 2008 as a spin-off of the Hospital Sant Pau Biomedical Research Institute (IIB Sant Pau) and the University of Barcelona (UB), has announced this participation in WispATDrug just two months after announcing the beginning of the preclinical phase on Oncostane, one of the first oral treatments for pancreatic cancer, which is moving into regulatory preclinical trials and has a completely different action mechanism from those currently used to fight the disease.

More information is available on the PCB website.

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