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WEHI spinout aims to revolutionize the development of cancer drugs

Australia has cemented its role in becoming a major player in the next generation of medicines with the launch of Ternarx – a globally competitive biotechnology company dedicated to finding new treatments for hard-to-treat cancers. The WEHI spinout is the firs

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Australia has cemented its role in becoming a major player in the next generation of medicines with the launch of Ternarx – a globally competitive biotechnology company dedicated to finding new treatments for hard-to-treat cancers.

The WEHI spinout is the first of its kind in Australia dedicated to developing targeted protein degrader medicines and technology, a powerful new tool for destroying disease-causing proteins that cannot be targeted by conventional drugs.

Ternarx is backed by $15 million in funding from the Australian Medical Research Future Fund's (MRFF) Frontier Health and Medical Research initiative and by support from Melbourne-based medical research institute WEHI.

The company has been officially launched by the Australian Minister for Health and Aged Care, Mark Butler.

While scientists have uncovered many of the drivers of cancer, about 80% of all disease-causing proteins have been considered "undruggable".

New biotechnology company, Ternarx, aims at changing this statistic through the development of targeted protein degrader (TPD) technology, which is designed to destroy these "undruggable" proteins.

Unlike conventional drugs that only inhibit the activity of proteins, TPDs can target and destroy disease-causing proteins, completely removing the proteins from the cancer.

Ternarx is the first company of its kind in Australia, focusing on the development of TPD medicines and technology.

In 2023, the MRFF's Frontier Health and Medical Research initiative awarded $15 million in funding to establish the Australian Centre for Targeted Therapeutics (ACTT) – a collaboration between experts from WEHI, the Children's Cancer Institute and Monash University. WEHI has now spun out Ternarx to form a globally competitive biotech company and commercialize the ACTT technology.

It is an honor to officially launch Ternarx, a significant and exciting addition to Australia's growing, high-quality medical and biotech sector. The technology it is pursuing has huge potential to create the next generation of treatments for cancer and other diseases that are currently untreatable. Ternarx is proof that Australia's health and medical researchers are world leading. With support from the MRFF, our brilliant researchers can turn their ideas into new treatments that have potential to save thousands of lives, not just here but around the world." Mark Butler, Minister for Health and Aged Care

Unlocking the 'undruggable'

WEHI director Professor Ken Smith said the landmark initiative would help establish Australia as a leader in this frontier field.

"With the potential to unlock the 'undruggable', targeted protein degrader technology is one of the most exciting advances in drug discovery and development," Prof Smith said.

"The establishment of Ternarx is a testament to the wealth of scientific knowledge that exists on our shores, and our ability to remain at the forefront of cutting-edge technologies that have real potential to make a difference to our communities.

"To have the greatest impact on human health, we need to continually drive the translation of our discoveries into the new homegrown treatments, diagnostics and devices required to ensure we can live healthier, for longer.

"We thank the MRFF for continually backing the nation's brightest researchers, helping us to bridge the critical gap between discovery and translation and ensuring that we can confidently tackle our hardest health challenges."

A new frontier in medicine

Ternarx will initially focus on developing new treatments for neuroblastoma and prostate cancer.

Neuroblastoma is a childhood cancer that claims more lives of children under five than any other cancer, while prostate cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer among Australian men.

Ternarx CEO, Dr Joanne Boag, said the company will be using and developing novel TPD technology to create new drug candidates and ultimately new ways to treat these cancers and, potentially, other diseases.

"Neuroblastoma and some forms of prostate cancer urgently need new treatments, as evidenced by poor patient outcomes," Dr Boag said.

"TPD technology opens up new avenues to attack these and other hard to treat cancers by delivering precision treatment options.

"This technology could revolutionize treatments for the millions of people in Australia and around the world who continue to live with notoriously difficult-to-treat diseases, including cancer and autoimmune conditions."

While the initial focus will be cancer, the TPD technology developed by Ternarx has the potential to be applied to a range of disease-causing proteins, including those associated with currently untreatable inflammatory diseases like ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease, and neurological conditions such as Alzheimer's disease, Huntington's disease and Parkinson's disease.

Harnessing expertise

Ternarx will leverage Australia's top cancer experts and research to progress new TPD treatments towards clinical trials, bringing together a core team with deep research expertise as well as biopharmaceutical drug discovery and management experience.

With further investment, the company has the potential to deliver significant revenue into Australia through co-development and licensing deals, with the TPD market size forecast to grow to USD $3.3 billion by 2030.

Through its Scientific Advisory Board and other scientific engagements, Ternarx will draw world-leading scientific expertise from Australian scientists Professor John Silke (WEHI), Professor Guillaume Lessene (WEHI), Professor David Komander (WEHI), Professor Michelle Haber (Children's Cancer Institute) and Professor Susan Charman (Monash University).

The Ternarx management team is composed of high-calibre scientists with experience in the biopharmaceutical sector:

  • Dr Joanne Boag, CEO
  • Dianna McKiernan, COO
  • Dr Nicole Trainor, Lead Chemist
  • Dr Bernhard Lechtenberg, Structural and Cell Biology Lead (part appointment)
  • Dr Rebecca Feltham, Target Biology Lead (part appointment)

The Ternarx Board incorporates senior leaders with a track record in governing and developing innovative biopharmaceutical companies delivering world-class R&D programs:

  • Dr Victoria Jameson, Business Development lead, WEHI
  • Dr Amanda Reese, Director, Enterprise, Monash University
  • Dr Chris Burns, Managing Director and CEO, Amplia Therapeutics

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Related questions

01You have worked across the full drug development pipeline. How has that experience shaped your view of where AI can have the greatest impact in drug safety discovery?

Having worked across different parts of the discovery process, I think broad exposure changes the way you think. I have developed quantum chemistry, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) methods in research settings, but I have also had the chance to apply them in real discovery environments for materials and pharmaceuticals. That experience has shown me how different parts of the discovery pipeline interact, what their motivations are, and how they communicate. AI and ML have been used in early discovery for many years, but the biggest recent shift is in areas dominated by human processes and communication. Computers can now interact directly with human language and analytical images, opening new applications such as AI research assistants and AI-assisted dossier drafting. That means AI can start to work more collaboratively with scientists, although expert oversight and guardrails remain essential. In nonclinical safety, I think the biggest impact will be AI working alongside safety scientists to unearth key data, connect safety science with earlier discovery and later clinical work, and help process, predict, and summarize important outcomes. That could help safety science integrate more tightly with design, make, and test cycles in discovery, while also interfacing earlier with clinical science. Save a Copy of This Exclusive Interview by Downloading the Free PDF

Source: www.news-medical.net ↗
02How will this discovery change cancer science?

This is a win for the field. Until now, we have been focused on immune therapies that might make tumors more vulnerable to the body's immune system, and on finding new chemotherapy combinations that kill cancer cells. This new treatment has given us a new focus, and I think it will spur a lot of scientific discovery over the next few years. There have only been a handful of KRAS researchers and their relevance to therapy was always questioned. That is about to change. The most important next step for the field is to better understand the biology of cancer. We know that many pancreatic tumors will eventually become resistant to daraxonrasib, and we need to understand how this happens. We also need to identify additional genetic pathways and treatments that can target them. That's how we will turn pancreas cancer from a deadly, deadly cancer into something we can manage-and one day, even cure.

Source: www.news-medical.net ↗
03How does vitamin D strengthen the immune system?

More specifically, the study showed that the female patient produced very few cathelicidins, which is a natural toxin found in the immune cells of the lungs needed to fight tuberculosis. In most people infected by tuberculosis, tuberculosis bacteria attack the immune cells of the lungs. The immune cells fight the bacteria by eating them. But the tuberculosis bacterium has developed various evasive mechanisms that reduce the immune cells’ ability to digest and thus to kill the Mtb. “You could say that the tuberculosis bacterium has developed a way to lull the immune cells to sleep. This enables the disease the hide inside the immune cells, making it invisible to other parts of the immune system,” Martin Kongsbak-Wismann explains. This is where vitamin D enters the picture. Because vitamin D is able to counteract the soporific effect of the tuberculosis bacteria by making the immune cells produce more of the cathelicidin toxin. “Cathelicidin is like a microscopic needle that is able to pierce the tuberculosis bacteria. And when it does, it weakens the bacteria’s soporific effect on the immune cells. This restores the immune cells’ ability to kill tuberculosis bacteria,” says Martin Kongsbak-Wismann and adds: “We were amazed by the effect of vitamin D. In immune cells from healthy control subjects, vitamin D improved the cells’ ability to fight Mtb, whereas in the female patient’s immune cells we saw no response to vitamin D. This shows that vitamin D is key to the immune system’s ability to fight Mtb and prevent tuberculosis.” Al-Jaberi, F.A.H., et al. (2022) Reduced vitamin D-induced cathelicidin production and killing of Mycobacterium tuberculosis in macrophages from a patient with a non-functional vitamin D receptor: A case report. Frontiers in Immunology. doi.org/10.3389/fimmu.2022.1038960.

Source: www.news-medical.net ↗
04How long does it take for vitamins to work?

Biologically, vitamins are absorbed within hours and have instant metabolic effects, such as antioxidants that protect cells or compounds that are building blocks for making hormones. But, many factors impact their efficiency and could keep your body from fully absorbing them. Absorption and effects depend on each individual and what combination of vitamins they take. Gender, age, digestive health, medical conditions, and diet all play a role. One helpful practice to detect deficiencies is to look for the symptoms deficiencies create. Then, look for improvement in your symptoms with supplement intake. You are unlikely to see or feel changes if you do not lack nutrients. If you are chronically tired or see signs of unhealthy nails, hair, or skin, supplements may help as these are indicators that you are lacking nutrients in your diet. If you are unsure, your doctor can order tests to check for deficiencies in your blood.

Source: www.medicinenet.com ↗
05What impact do you think the use of AI in drug discovery could ultimately have for patients?

One of the first ways in which this would be really felt by patients is through the repurposing of existing drugs for new diseases. Clearly, even though one could improve the process in a number of ways in terms of speeding up medicinal chemistry programs and potentially speeding up the amount of things such as toxicity trials etc., that is still going to take time. However, if we can take existing drugs, perhaps drugs which have gone off patent or are currently being marketed for another indication, and repurpose them in areas where there are high unmet medical needs, those drugs could go into that new indication in phase 2 in patients and you would know very quickly whether the drug worked or not. Then the route to market or the route to being able to make the drug more broadly available to patients would be much more rapid because you don't have to go through all those earlier stages of toxicity, testing, phase 1 testing, volunteers and so on.

Source: www.news-medical.net ↗
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Peptide Therapy Guide Editorial Team

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