09 Nov Quintessence cancer treatment chosen for clinical studies
Madison, Wis. – Quintessence Biosciences, a biopharmaceutical company developing cancer therapies, has announced that QB139, one of its EVade cancer treatments, has been selected for preclinical testing and human clinical trials.
Quintessence said that pending a favorable preclinical safety assessment, it would submit to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration an investigational new drug application in late 2007, with human clinical trials expected to begin in early 2008.
The company is developing new drugs based on its EVade ribonuclease technologies. In pre-clinical disease models, the QB139 compound demonstrated safe tumor-growth inhibition in vivo (inside the body) against human pancreatic, non-small cell lung, prostate, and ovarian tumors.
Of the 30 EVade ribonucleases that Quintessence has tested, QBI-139 had the broadest efficacy in multiple tumor lines.
“QBI-139 is the first of some very exciting compounds identified in our drug development efforts,” Ralph Kauten, president and CEO of Quintessence, said in a release. “Because of the similarity between the native human protein and Evade ribonucleases, we have great expectations that our candidates will lead to a new class of cancer therapies that are well tolerated by patients.”
Quintessence, which has established partnerships for the development of its cancer treatments, presented results for QB139 at the joint meeting of the European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer, the U.S. National Cancer Institute, and the American Association for Cancer Research in Prague, Czech Republic.
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