A SCOTTISH pharmaceutical company behind a cancer gene therapy believed to have the potential to make chemotherapy four times more effective has secured £1.3 million of new funding.
Selkirk-based Ryboquin said its product is closer to the clinical trial stage after securing £800,000 from existing investors, including Scottish Enterprise, Tri Cap, Braveheart and board members, as well as new backers.
It has also been boosted by a Scottish Enterprise SMART fund research and development grant worth £495,000.
Ryboquin is behind one of a new class of gene therapy drugs which are designed to make chemotherapy more effective.
It plans to use the funding to begin scaling up the Ryboquin ECP-102 product, a tumour apoptosis enhancer, from lab-scale to pilot-plant or commercial scale.
This will allow it to be tested in a full-scale clinical trial, which the privately-owned company is looking to fund by raising a further £7 million to £10m from institutional investors.
Working on scaling up the product will be carried out by the University of Strathclyde’s Institute of Pharmacy and Biomedical Sciences, under professor of pharmacy practice Alex Mullen. The company also works closely with University College London, where the patented nanoparticle, called LiPTide, which delivers the Ribonucleic acid (RNA) molecules to the targeted cells was developed.
Ryboquin chief executive Alan Walker said: “In Ryboquin, we now have a product that we believe could enable traditional chemotherapy to be up to four times as effective in some people and reduce some of the side effects of this treatment in some others. This funding will enable us to take Ryboquin from the laboratory to a place where it can be used in hospital for a clinical trial.”
Mr Mullen said: “This is an exciting opportunity for us to work in partnership and to accelerate the process that might ultimately see this product getting into a clinical environment where it may be of benefit to patients. I relish the prospect of co-ordinating the science relating to the scaling up of this product in order to get it from the laboratory into clinical trials.”
Borders-based Ryboquin focuses on commercialising patented technologies in the cancer medicine area.
Jim Wilson, director of innovation and enterprise at Scottish Enterprise, said: "It's fantastic to be able to support this ambitious Scottish company in scaling up its business."
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