Despite the bewildering amount of drugs that have been invented, there are still many diseases that lack any pharmacological treatment approach. And for many more the available options are suboptimal. Hence our interest in identifying, selecting and validating drug targets. That's the first step in drug development and together with the toxicology and pharmacokinetics data forms the preclinical phase of drug development.
At the moment we focus on antiangiogenic cancer drugs, i.e. drugs that do not target the tumor cells directly, but that work by cutting off the blood supply to the tumor ("starving the cancer to death"). Why antiangiogenic cancer drugs? Even though there are effective antiangiogenic cancer drugs on the market (e.g. Avastin™), they are not as good as they potentially could be.
Cancers are dependent on Vascular endothelial growth factors (VEGFs): VEGFs make the blood vessels grow, that support the cancer with nutrients and oxygen and allow it to grow. There is already a drug targeting VEGF-A (Avastin™), which helps cancer patients to stay alive longer.
However, most cancers become sooner or later resistant to Avastin™. There is good evidence that cancers become resistant by using VEGF-C instead of VEGF-A. And there is no cancer drug on the market that universally targets VEGF-C. So far, nobody has been successful in generating a drug effective against all forms of VEGF-C ("pan-inhibitory antibody"). We want to develop a biotherapeutical drug to fill this gap. Such drug would - similar to Avastin™ - broaden our tool kit to fight cancer and increase the survival rates for many patients.
We are developing antibody drugs, because antibodies are generally well tolerated. Antibodies have been engineered by nature as infectious-disease fighting drugs. Unfortunately, our bodies generally cannot mount an effective antibody response against cancer cells or cancer-supporting cells. We believe, that using genetic engineering and synthetic biology, we should be able to develop a technology, that can generate such antibodies - tailored to any target - within a few days in the laboratory.
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