NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) — Curie-Cancer, which leads Institut Curie's industry partnerships, and the French drug developer Servier have extended an ongoing partnership focused on breast cancer research for another three years, they said today.
Institut Curie and Servier teamed up in 2005 to launch the program, which aims to identify therapeutic targets for treating triple-negative breast cancers.
Triple negative cases make up about 15 percent of all breast cancers, are particularly aggressive, and because they do not express estrogen or progesterone receptors, or Her-2 receptors, are unresponsive to current chemotherapies.
Under the agreement, the partners will share any intellectual property that results from this research, which harnesses Institut Curie's extensive collection of breast cancer samples, and involves doctors and researchers with a wide range of specialties, including geneticists, bioinformaticians, biochemists, and biologists.
The partners said they have uncovered "a number of very promising leads," and have identified a therapeutic target, kinase TTK/MPS1, for which a therapeutic is already in preclinical development.
"Our decision to extend the partnership for a further three years was inspired by these highly encouraging results, the need to look at the other results obtained in more depth, and the desire to explore other potential leads,” Servier President of R&D Emmanuel Canet said in a statement.
Last year, Servier partnered with Oncodesign and other drug developers in a $17.4 million cancer biomarker profiling study funded by the French government, the Innovative MODels Initiative.