ARU collaborates on new childhood cancer project

Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) is collaborating with Scottish biopharmaceutical company Medannex on a £313,000 project to develop a new treatment for a childhood bone cancer.

Thanks to funding from Innovate UK’s Cancer Therapeutics programme, Medannex will work with senior scientists at ARU’s School of Life Sciences and world-leading paediatric oncologists to prepare its first-in-class therapy MDX-124 for a clinical study focusing on paediatric osteosarcoma.

MDX-124 is the first clinic-ready agent to target annexin-A1, a protein known to drive numerous cancers and other diseases. In preclinical tests, MDX-124 has been shown to stop the growth and spread of certain cancers, as well as harnessing the immune system to attack tumours. MDX-124 is currently being evaluated in a first-in-human Phase 1b oncology study in adults (‘ATTAINMENT’).

Recent data mining of a paediatric genomics database and staining of tumour tissue has revealed that annexin-A1 is highly expressed in osteosarcoma, making MDX-124 a strong candidate to treat this form of cancer.

Osteosarcoma is a rare primary cancer of the bone characterised by a high degree of malignancy, strong invasiveness, rapid disease progression and a high mortality rate. Approximately 50% of cases are in children and young adults, representing about 2% of all paediatric cancers.

In the UK, around 65% of children with osteosarcoma survive for five years after diagnosis, however this drops to only 24% for those with metastatic disease. Therefore, there remains a significant unmet clinical need for novel therapies like MDX-124.

Professor Chris Parris, Head of the School of Life Sciences at ARU, said:

The project’s Clinical Advisory Board is led by Professor Pamela Kearns, Chair of Clinical Paediatric Oncology at the University of Birmingham, who said:

Medannex CEO, Ian Abercrombie, said:

Innovate UK, the UK’s innovation agency, will fund £231,000 of the project costs, with the remainder financed by Medannex.