TRx Biosciences presents classic Cambridge healthcare breakthrough22 Oct 2021 08:45
Rx’s founders are CEO Dr Robin Bannister, CSO John Brew and CBO Dr Dan Gooding: together, in a small lab within Babraham’s accelerator building for the last six months, they have achieved a breakthrough in the development of a novel drug targeting technology, with the potential to disrupt how all small molecule drugs might be delivered.
The breakthrough is significant not just because it makes use of the lymphatic system – thus avoiding the liver to distribute drugs to the patient – but also because TRx has created a business model offering immense speed of product development for novel use of existing drugs, drugs stuck in development or new chemical entities.
At launch this week, four existing collaborative users of TRx’s approach were unveiled: Cambridge-based Monument Therapeutics, Canada-based Mandara Pharma, Oxford-based Olixio, and Cancer Research UK (CRUK).
“Essentially, we’ve found a novel, safe and completely unexploited mechanism that uses natural human biology to transform the way we deliver small molecule drugs,” said Dr Gooding, who was founder and CEO of Nuformix until mid-2020. “It completely turns what scientists have thought about in terms of small molecule drug design and delivery for years on its head.
“We’ve built the company carefully, and have initially formed partnerships with a select few drug companies who face specific bio-distribution challenges in their R&D programmes. We’ve used these partnerships to better understand the possibilities of our technology and have demonstrated that we can solve a broad range of drug targeting and delivery challenges, including enhanced delivery to the brain, lung, tumours and immune system.
“We’re targeting the lymphatic absorption system in a very specific way, which avoids the liver – that’s good, because there can be huge drug loss via the liver due to metabolism. From there we can target the brain or other specific cells and tissues. TRx’s technology interacts with the lymphatic system in ways not previously possible. It’s a totally different approach.”
Sign In
Follow the stocks
