Business
Inaphaea award of HEIF Funding and PhD sponsorship
Inaphaea award of HEIF Funding and PhD sponsorship.
About this update from Valirx Plc
[{"type":"text","content":"\n\nValiRx plc\n \n(\"ValiRx\" or the \"Company\")\n \nInaphaea award of HEIF Funding and PhD sponsorship\n \nLondon, UK - ValiRx Plc (AIM: VAL), a life science company focusing on early-stage cancer therapeutics and women's health, provides the following update from its wholly owned subsidiary Inaphaea BioLabs Limited (\"Inaphaea\").\nInaphaea is pleased to confirm it has agreed to collaborate on a project using funds from The Open University's Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF) to characterise the subtype and drug sensitivity of up to 12 Prostate Cancer lines from Inaphaea's Patient Derived Cell (\"PDC\") bank. The project will utilise The Open University's expertise in characterisation of Neuroendocrine Prostate Cancer (\"NEPC\"), an incurable subtype of prostate cancer, to look for characteristic markers of NEPC in Inaphaea's PDC models under normal and low oxygen conditions, known to promote an NEPC like state.\nIn addition ValiRx will be co-sponsoring a PhD Studentship over the course of four years at The Open University titled 'Deciphering the epigenetic vulnerabilities of neuroendocrine prostate cancer through novel patient-derived models'. The four-year programme includes further characterisation and drug responsiveness of up to 12 of Inaphaea's Patient Derived Prostate Cancer Cell systems as well as screening for novel epigenetic targets as potential novel treatment opportunities.\n \nMark Eccleston, CEO of ValiRx commented \"Inaphaea has over 30 Patient Derived Cell models from prostate cancer patients, several with RNA-Seq data available. These cells have been stabilised for in vitro passage, but they are not characterised in terms of cancer subtype and drug sensitivity. Collecting and publishing this information is essential to enable the use of these cell lines by the scientific community. Hence, characterisation of the Inaphaea prostate PDCs could add significant value to this collection and generate an invaluable research tool for the NEPC community. However, this type of work requires specialised expertise in preclinical cancer research that is beyond the capabilities of Inaphaea.\"\nFrancesco Crea, Professor of Cancer Pharmacology at the Faculty of Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics, The Open University commented \"Neuroendocrine prostate cancer is a newly recognise...