Media Release - For Immediate Release

April 27 2010

Innovascreen and Saint Mary's University Partner to Advance Brain Cancer Therapeutics

A Saint Mary’s Chemistry professor is partnering with a local drug testing firm to determine the potential of a library of 150 new compounds in order to assess their potential for the treatment of certain kinds of cancer.

The new compounds are analogues of the known anticancer drug, dacarbazine, which has been the drug of choice for treating human malignant melanoma (a deadly form of skin cancer) for more than 50 years. More recently, within the last 15 years, an analogue of dacarbazine, called temodal, has emerged as a first line therapy for an aggressive type of brain tumour known as glioblastoma.

Dr. Keith Vaughan says "it is worth noting that the discovery of both of these drugs had an element of serendipity in that they were designed to serve one purpose but turned out to be viable drugs for a different reason." Dacarbazine was originally designed as an anti-metabolite, but it's activity turned out to be due to its ability to methylate DNA, and it became the drug of choice for clinical treatment of melanoma.

However, the efficacy of dacarbazine was always limited due to the requirement for metabolic activation, and temodal was developed in the hope that it would offer significant improvement in efficacy while maintaining safety without the need for activation. When temodal was tested on a battery of different tumours, it was found quite unexpectedly to be highly efficacious against brain tumours.

Dr. Vaughan believes there is still room for improvement in the effectiveness of drugs like dacarbazine and temodal. To that end, the university has entered into an agreement with Innovascreen of Halifax that will see the drug testing company use its unique technology to examine Dr. Vaughan’s library of drugs and conduct preclinical validation studies on promising finds to determine safety and efficacy.

“Using state of the art imaging technology we can capture a therapeutic effect on key physiological characteristics necessary for selecting compounds with the most potential.” says Dr. John Lewis, Innovascreen’s President and CEO.

Dr. Vaughan says the findings can be used to focus further research on the most promising therapeutic candidates from the library and identify compounds with the best opportunity to continue into clinical trials. Serendipity might be a factor again; any one of the compounds in the library could turn out to be active against one of the many other types of cancer that take lives.

“With Innovascreen, we have identified the partner with the best chance to ensure the success of this novel compound library," Dr. Vaughan says

Innovascreen is a privately held company headquartered in Halifax.

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For More Information:

Steve Proctor
External Affairs
Saint Mary's University
(902) 420.5513
E-mail: steve.proctor@smu.ca
www.smu.ca

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