NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Exonhit today said it has been awarded €1.9 million ($2.4 million) to participate in a project aimed at developing new treatments for cancers and tools to identify patients who may be best candidates for the treatments.
The funding comes from OSEO's Strategic Industrial Innovation program and is directed at the development of therapies for the enzymatic treatment of chemo- or radio-resistant cancers, as well as tools to identify likely responders. The project is expected to last eight years and the consortium will receive a total of €10.7 million in funding from OSEO to carry out the project, called TEDAC (Therapeutic Enzymes to Deplete Amino acids to treat Cancers resistant to radio/chemotherapy).
Other members of the consortium are Erytech Pharma, InGen BioSciences, AP-HP (Paris Public Hospitals), France's INSERM (National Institute for Medical Research), and Paris-Diderot University.
For TEDAC Exonhit will identify biomarkers of susceptibility to therapeutic response "in the context of reducing the risks associated with the development of treatments," and develop an enzymatic therapy companion diagnostic test.
The Paris-based company will use its Genome Wide SpliceArray to study tumor transcriptomic profiles in the initial phase of the project, it said. Exonhit received €1.1 million in funding at the inception of the project.
"This project is a new opportunity for the company to implement its expertise in the development of companion diagnostics, and a key step in the implementation of our strategy in personalized medicine," Loïc Maurel, CEO of Exonhit, said in a statement. "The financial support of OSEO will also enable us to move towards solutions better adapted to the commercialization of diagnostics developed using our [Genome Wide SpliceArray] technology."
OSEO's Strategic Industrial Innovation program supports collaboration between European academic institutions and medium-sized and small businesses to develop and commercialize new technologies.