As part of a new research deal with Celgene Corp., a startup with intriguing technology that could someday enable personalized medicine by letting doctors test different cancer drugs in a patient’s own tumor has been infused with an $8 million equity investment.
Presage Biosciences disclosed the Celgene deal a few weeks ago but revealed the $8 million value of the accompanying equity investment in a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing last week. According to Xconomy, another $5 million in up-front payments from the deal will support research. President Nathan Caffo told Xconomy the company planned to use the cash to double in size and add new capabilities that would make its technologies easier to use.
A media representative declined to provide details on the potential for $7.8 million more in equity investments the company disclosed in its filing.
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Under the deal, Celgene will use Presage’s technology for preclinical screening of cancer drug candidates. The platform technology enables researchers to place multiple “threads” of potential treatments into a living tumor and compare side-by-side how well they kill cancer cells. Initially, that could give researchers and drug companies a better idea of which candidates might be most poised for success in humans before they move into the costly realm of clinical trials.
Although a record number of cancer drugs are in development, some estimates have put the failure rate among cancer drugs entering clinical trials as high as 95 percent.
In 2012, Presage signed a similar research deal with Millennium Pharmaceuticals, the oncology subsidiary of Takeda Pharmaceuticals, for nonexclusive use of its drug-testing platform.
These deals bring some money in the door and put the technology to good use, but Presage has a more ambitious long-term goal. Its researchers are reportedly working on a hand-held device that would help doctors tailor treatments for cancer patients. With the device, they would be able to inject microdoses of cancer drugs directly into a tumor while it’s still in the body. After the tumor is removed during surgery, they could section it and analyze a patient’s unique response to the different drugs, and choose the one that killed the most cancer cells for use in larger doses to kill cancer cells that have spread throughout the patient’s body.
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Seattle-based Presage was formed in 2008 based on technology invented in the lab of pediatric oncologist Dr. James Olson at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Olson is also the scientific co-founder of Blaze Bioscience, a company developing “tumor paint” to illuminate cancer cells during surgery.
[Cancer research lab photo from BigStock Photos]