Given billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong’s general save-the-world M.O., it’s always worth tracking what his companies are up to.
NantBioScience, an offshoot of his Los Angeles startup NantWorks, has partnered up with University of Colorado to develop protein-targeted anti-cancer drugs and diagnostics. The licensing deal is exclusive, and focuses on the Ral protein – which plays a role across activated signaling pathways in pancreatic, lung, colon and other cancers.
University of Colorado’s work, formulated by researcher Dan Theodorescu, just got published in Nature: “Discovery and characterization of small molecules that target the GTPase Ral.” The idea here is that blocking these Ral proteins that drive tumor growth and metastasis could be valuable as both research tools and cancer therapeutics.
When Investment Rhymes with Canada
Canada has a proud history of achievement in the areas of science and technology, and the field of biomanufacturing and life sciences is no exception.
“This collaboration with Dr. Dan Theodorescu and the University of Colorado Comprehensive Cancer Center furthers our goal to catalyze personalized precision cancer care in our war against cancer,” Soon-Shiong said.
Nantworks, launched last year with more than $140 million in funding since, has a number of offshoots in addition to its NantBioScience branch, which focuses on drug discovery on the protein level with aims to personalize medicine. Other segments include NantCloud, which works on terrabyte-level fast data transfer and NantHealth, which centers around “connecting knowledge at a global, interoperable scale from home to clinic to hospital to benefit a single patient and the whole of humanity.”
Save the world, indeed.
