TamoRx – a greater hope for a fighting chance
A spin out company focussed on developing immunotherapy medicines based on MWC research and facilities is providing hope for novel treatments to combat advanced metastatic cancer.
Immunotherapy is the most promising therapy to achieve long-term survival from cancer in cases where it has spread through the body. Drug treatments targeting many different mechanisms within a person’s own immune system, can amplify the body’s own responses to improve life expectancy and cure some patients with even the most advanced cancer. However, current immunotherapy drugs still only work in a minority of cancer patients, so there is a large unmet need for new immunotherapy approaches.
MWC investigators Dr Joanna Mathy and Prof Rod Dunbar, working in the Cancer Immunotherapy Flagship, have founded TamoRx, a cancer drug research company focussed on novel drug development.
The team at TamoRx is hoping to exploit a novel discovery from research undertaken by Dr Mathy during her MWC PhD scholarship and work as a Research Fellow in Professor Rod Dunbar’s laboratory at the University of Auckland. Dr Mathy’s research uncovered a mechanism that restricts the immune system from fighting cancer. She says that targeting this new immune control pathway offers “new hope to help activate patients’ own immune systems to attack and destroy cancer cells within tumours”.
Dr Mathy says “Success would be new therapeutics that can target this immune control mechanism without affecting other cells in the body. We want to move quickly to bring new immunotherapy to patients as soon as possible.”
Both Dr Mathy and Prof Dunbar acknowledge that MWC has played a big role in enabling the company to be founded, both in supporting Dr Mathy’s PhD and in building the technical capabilities of the Dunbar Laboratory over many years. Collaborative links with the Auckland Cancer Society Research Centre (ACSRC) developed through the MWC network also enabled access to sophisticated computational drug screening technology established by Associate Professor Jack Flannagan and his team at the ACSRC.
TamoRx’s aim is to develop small molecule inhibitors that work either as a single agent or in combination with other treatments, increasing the number of patients who can benefit from immunotherapy. More than $15 million has been invested in the start-up by life science investor Brandon Capital along with the University of Auckland Inventors' Fund, managed by UniServices, the University's commercialisation and research impact company.
Prof Dunbar says the substantial funding injection is sufficient to take the lead drug through to early-stage clinical trials.
Duncan Mackintosh, head of Brandon BioCatalyst1 in New Zealand says a world-class team is developing what could be a revolutionary therapy for cancer patients globally. “It is great to see this happen from New Zealand, really highlighting the capability of our research community.”
TamoRx is one of many start-ups and technology licences sprung from the MWC network.
1 Formerly the Australian Medical Research Foundation