Oxford Biomedica. 2005 to see 'Huge value creation' (Panmure Gordon)

Sector interest from Telegraph today-

New type of drug offers chance to 'switch off' cancer treatment
By Roger Highfield
(Filed: 27/12/2005)


A British team is pushing back the frontiers in cancer treatment by creating a new generation of "epigenetic" drugs.

Most cancer drugs under development rest on research that links the disease to mutations in the genes which make cell growth run wild.

Now there is a growing interest in epigenetic mechanisms that turn genes on and off and are the reason why heart, brain and skin cells contain exactly the same genetic code, only used in different ways.

Chemical changes to DNA and proteins linked to DNA underpin these mechanisms and scientists hope to develop a new generation of treatments for cancer when epigenetic changes drive cells to grow out of control.

"Many cancers have abnormal epigenetic profiles," said Dr Will West, the chief executive officer of CellCentric, in Cambridge, which is commercialising the work of one of the leading researchers in the field, Prof Azim Surani, of the Gurdon Institute, Cambridge University.

Prof Surani, the scientific founder of CellCentric, did pioneering work to show how mammalian cells were capable of erasing epigenetic modifications in adult cells.

His laboratory is continuing to work on understanding the mechanisms of epigenetic control and identify factors that erase epigenetic changes.

All genes are controlled by epigenetic mechanisms, incl-uding tumour suppressor genes, oncogenes, and other cancer-associated genes.

"This drives the cells to have incorrect functions, be proliferative and in some cases not respond to traditional cancer drugs," Dr West said.

CellCentric is developing antibody drugs to attack proteins that are linked with epigenetic changes and that appear on the cell surface of cancer cells. By doing so, they hope to halt tumours.

"By targeting errant epigenetic mechanisms, cancer cells can be selected for destruction," Dr West said.

This year the company announced that, working with Cancer Research Technology Ltd (CRT), it was developing an antibody against its lead epigenetic-related cell surface protein.

CRT is the commercial arm of Cancer Research UK and Dr West said the collaboration marked the first time it had directly invested in developing a technology that had not been discovered by the charity.

The National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts (Nesta) is also to invest £150,000 in CellCentric.

The money will enable the company to test its methods on human cancer cells grown by Prof Chris Boshoff's laboratory at the Wolfson Institute, University College London.

Jonathan Kestenbaum, the head of Nesta, said: "CellCentric is a classic illustration of a British firm that is successfully exploiting ground-breaking science."