Noxopharm (ASX:NOX) has announced progress on its Chroma technology platform, encouraging early drug leads with anticancer activity for glioblastoma and leukaemia.
The company's Chroma drug development program runs in parallel with its Sofra program.
Noxopharm and the University of South Australia (UniSA) recently received a $100,000 grant from Tour de Cure to conduct preclinical work on two novel first-in-class drugs developed via the Chroma platform.
Noxopharm said the drugs have been tested on an extensive biobank of patient-derived tumour explant organoids (GBOs), a state-of-the-art glioblastoma explant model established by Dr Helen Palethorpe and Professor Guillermo Gomez at the Centre for Cancer Biology, UniSA.
Dr Palethorpe said, "Methods to generate and biobank patient-derived explants are very time consuming, technically demanding and time sensitive. We have established and finessed a highly sophisticated method for generating and biobanking these explants, which is essential to maintain the original tumour composition for preclinical testing of novel compounds developed by the Chroma drug development program."
The company said the Chroma platform was also used to identify a novel drug targeting a gene mutation found in Acute Myeloid Leukaemia (AML) that arises during current standard-of-care treatment. As a consequence of this mutation, the cancer becomes resistant to standard-of-care drugs.
"Early findings show the novel Chroma drug candidate can overcome this common problem of drug resistance, which can happen any time during or after the treatment," said Noxopharm.
CEO Dr Gisela Mautner said, "We are building momentum in the Chroma platform with these results, broadening it out to target glioblastoma as well as explore blood cancers like leukaemia. We intend to progress this research and work closely with the world-class team at UniSA to generate new data and understand these first-in-class drugs more deeply. This is very worthwhile when there is clearly a great need for new approaches, and having several promising drug candidates in simultaneous development also increases commercial opportunities."
