Moncton Company Starts New Human Trials For Cancer Drug Developed From Shrew Venom
MONCTON – A Moncton biotech company’s cancer treatment that uses proteins found in shrew venom is preparing for the second phase of human trials.
Soricimed Biopharma is preparing for the second stage of clinical human trials for a new cancer therapy it is developing. The drug is made with a type of peptide (strings of amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins) that’s also found in the venom of the northern short-tailed shrew.
The privately-held company plans to shore up a definite date for its phase-two clinical human trials in the next three months.
“Our second phase of trial one had different dynamics than the first – it’s an evolved trial and trials continue to roll forward with good data responses,” said Soricimed CEO Robert Bruce.
“[Human trials] are where we’ll be spending a lot of our time and resources,” Bruce added. “Phase-one trials are all about safety and phase-two trials are all about efficacy.”
“We’re hoping to get ready to move forward on a phase-two clinical trial and be ready to go by the end of this year or early next year.”
The province, through the New Brunswick Innovation Fund (NBIF), is supporting the development of Soricimed’s treatment with a $200,000 investment.
Bruce said provincial investment is not uncommon for Soricimed but noted most of its investment comes from the private sector – specifically institutional capital. He said Soricimed will need financial support in the tens of millions to take its next steps.
“Developing new therapeutics for oncology applications requires a significant amount of capital – particularly when you’re going out of your pre-clinical laboratory work and looking to start introducing therapeutics to patients and going into human clinical trials,” he said.
“It’s a significant amount of capital we have to raise to continue to move forward. That’s just part of being in the life science sector. We’ve been efficient with the capital we received from investor and government sources over the years to get where we’re at. Most organizations would require two-to-three times the capital we get.”
However, Bruce stressed that the early stage funding Soricimed got from the government was crucial to its success.
“We wouldn’t have been able to develop our oncology platform without that funding,” he said. “You don’t get to human clinical trials in a matter of months – it takes years.”
Most of the capital Soricimed raises goes toward its development programs, navigating Health Canada’s approval process to get clearance to do clinical trials, manufacturing costs for pre-clinical work, and lab work.
“We do have some overhead, but we’re a small organization and only have eight employees, so most of the money we raised goes directly to program development,” Bruce said.
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To accommodate further work, Bruce said Soricimed is looking to bring more institutional investors on board over the next six months.
Soricimed’s cancer treatment is based on a peptide discovered in 2005 by founder Jack Stewart, a former professor at Mount Allison, which he isolated from the venom of the northern short-tailed shrew.
“They were able to isolate that very complex protein, identifying a unique sequence of amino acids, and they created a synthetic peptide,” said Bruce. He noted that the company hasn’t touched any shrews since 2006.
Bruce said the peptide’s ability to fight tumors by targeting a specific calcium ion channel was a serendipitous discovery. He said the company’s founders were looking to develop a pain management drug at the time.
“That was compelling and we recognized we needed to investigate because there aren’t a lot of effective treatments out there today for solid-tumor cancer patients,” said Bruce. “Even today, it’s still a huge, unmet need. We saw an opportunity to bring therapeutics to address that unmet need and that’s where the focus on oncology began.”
Soricimed works with a number of third parties, including Mount Allison University, Université de Moncton, Dalhousie University, the National Research Council, the American National Institutes of Health, MD Anderson Cancer Center, and numerous health authorities across Canada to conduct trials.
The company also regularly picks the brains of luminaries in the cancer-treatment field, such as Atlantic Cancer Research Scientific Director Rodney Ouellette, who is a member of its advisory board.
“It’s a long and complicated exercise to go through. We follow all those requirements and the whole thing is ‘do no harm’ so it’s a significant process to go through, capturing all that data with patients to understand what the drug is doing and not doing.”
Sam Macdonald is a Huddle reporter in Moncton. Send him your feedback and story ideas at [email protected].