by ecancer reporter Clare Sansom

One Nucleus, a networking organisation for companies and professionals in the biotech and healthcare industries based in Cambridge and London, holds a wide range of events throughout the year including one-day focused meetings in the Life Sciences Leadership series and informal evening meetings known as ‘BioWednesdays’.

BioWednesdays are held in London approximately monthly, and almost always, as the name implies, on Wednesday evenings.

The July 2015 meeting, which was held at the Royal Veterinary College (RVC) campus in Camden, central London, featured three varied and interesting talks under the heading of ‘Future Directions in Oncology’.
Jonathan Elliott, Vice Principal for Research and Innovation at the Royal Veterinary College, first gave a short introduction to the work of the College.

It was founded in the 1790s by a Frenchman studying racehorses, and it became the first veterinary school in the English-speaking world; it is still the only self-governing veterinary college in the UK.

It has two campuses, the central London one and one at Hawkshead in Hertfordshire, which includes an experimental farm.

The college owns and manages the London Bioscience Innovation Centre, which provides incubator space for life science companies, and it collaborates with other London colleges to provide postgraduate research and training through a research council funded Doctoral Training Partnership scheme.

The first of the three speakers was Christian Dillon from Cancer Research Technology CRT), which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the UK’s largest cancer research charity, Cancer Research UK.

CRT owns the exclusive rights to the intellectual property generated by Cancer Research UK scientists and it returns all profits to the charity for future investment in research.

It has partnered over 30 agents in pre-clinical and clinical development for many types of cancer.

The research model it uses has evolved since its launch in 2002; it now keeps the academic groups involved throughout the drug discovery phases, and aims to involve commercial partners earlier.

Dillon also described a recent CRT-funded project to develop inhibitors of the atypical serine-threonine kinase PKCι.

This protein has key roles in establishing and maintaining cellular polarity and it is known to be over-expressed in several epithelial tumour types, including non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).

Dillon described a compound developed in CRT’s Discovery Laboratory that was selective for this kinase with good in vitro potency and that has been made available to the research community as a chemical tool to aid the further understanding of PKCι biology.

Further research led to the development of more potent and drug-like compounds that are currently in pre-clinical development for NSCLC and potentially other epithelial cancers.

Oliver Garden, a professor of comparative medicine and immunology at the RVC, gave the second talk.
He is both a clinical veterinarian in the College’s well-equipped Queen Mother Hospital for Animals, and the leader of the Immune Regulation and Cancer research group at the College.

Companion animals, particularly dogs and cats, are often diagnosed with cancer, and these animals with spontaneous tumours provide important models for the human disease.

Dogs are about twice as likely to develop cancer as humans, and their pre-disposition to certain tumour types varies widely between breeds.

Garden’s research on the role of regulatory T calls in cancer and autoimmune diseases depends on animal models, but many rodent models of cancer involve animals with deficient or absent immune systems that cannot faithfully recapitulate the equivalent human diseases.

In contrast, the development of immune therapies for canine tumours is useful not only in itself but as a model system in human drug development.

The first canine-specific monoclonal antibody therapy, Aratana Therapeutics’ AT-004, was approved by the FDA to treat B-cell lymphoma in dogs early in 2015.

Testing candidate drugs for human cancer in dogs bearing spontaneous tumours during late pre-clinical development and alongside human clinical trials can increase the effectiveness of early trials, saving costs.

The final talk was given by Keren Paz, CSO of Champions Oncology Inc., a US-based biotech company that develops exquisitely specific mouse models of human tumours.

The technology pioneered by Champions Oncology involves taking complete samples from human tumours and implanting them into immunodeficient mice, either subcutaneously or into the equivalent organ site to that of the human tumour.

These implanted samples include all the complexities and heterogeneity of a human tumour; even trained histologists are unable to distinguish tumours taken from the mouse models between those from the original patients.

Once the initial tumours have grown to about 1000-1500 mm3 they are harvested and implanted into a further generation of mice.

These mice are used to test a series of potential treatments or groups of treatments in order to discover which are likely to be most effective in treating an individual patient’s tumour.

So far, about 900 of these ‘patient centric’ mouse models, covering a wide range of primary, metastatic, treatment naïve and pre-treated tumours, have been developed and characterised.

The models can also be used to test developmental drugs in order to determine which patients are most likely to benefit from the compounds.

As always at BioWednesday, the meeting ended with a lively networking session; the series will resume in September.