News Snippets: Senexis raises £2.9m; Cambridge Enterprise signs deal on potential Crohn's disease drug
Senexis Ltd, a private drug development company in which BTG plc is a shareholder, said it has secured £2.9m of new funding from the Wellcome Trust. The new funds will be used to optimise Senexis’ small molecule compounds as a potential disease-modifying treatment for Alzheimer’s disease and to progress their preclinical development. These compounds were licensed from BTG in 2006.
The Wellcome Trust award is being made available from its Seeding Drug Discovery initiative and augments an investment of £0.8m from BTG in 2007 and is in addition to the £2.4m that BTG and the Wellcome Trust had already invested in Senexis since November 2002.
“In spite of the attention Alzheimer’s disease receives, we know rather little about how to detect or treat the condition”, Ted Bianco, Director of Technology Transfer at the Wellcome Trust said. “Senexis are exploring an important avenue that we hope may lead to a disease-modifying therapy. It is precisely this sort of pioneering R&D that the Seeding Drug Discovery initiative was set up to facilitate”.
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Zeus Technology, a provider of application traffic management software, said that Networks Unlimited will begin selling and implementing ZWS, ZXTM software – including ZXTM Virtual Appliance – and ZXTM Global Load Balancer.
“We can see important market opportunities for Zeus Technology’s award-winning suite of application acceleration and load balancing solutions,” said Peter Reynolds, MD of Networks Unlimited. “Our customers need high availability of their online applications and each customer’s IT infrastructure is different, so ZXTM’s deployment flexibility is a huge advantage.”
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Cambridge Enterprise Ltd, the commercialisation office of the University of Cambridge, said a licence agreement has been completed with Medarex Inc for the potential development by Medarex of a therapeutic drug that will target cancer and autoimmune diseases.
A team from the University of Cambridge has identified a cell surface marker that is expressed at high levels in certain cancer cells and in some tissues affected by autoimmune diseases such as Crohn’s disease but at lower levels in tissues unaffected by disease. This marker may provide a target for the potential development of novel antibody based-medicines to treat diseases in patients.
Medarex is a US based company specialising in the development of fully human antibody therapeutics.
Professor John Trowsdale, Dr Rob Eagle and Dr Louise Bacon in the University of Cambridge, Department of Pathology, identified the target. Professor Trowsdale said:“ Our initial studies on this protein have been fascinating and we are continuing our research on how it functions in health and disease. Meanwhile, we are delighted that Medarex plans to use its technology to generate antibodies to this target, which may lead to the development of novel therapeutics.”
18th January 2008
