Kintara Therapeutics Inc has announced a multi-year research grant from Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR) and Cancer Foundation Luxembourg to support the research of its VAL-083 program to treat glioblastoma (GBM), an aggressive brain cancer.
The grant has been awarded to Dr. Anna Golebiewska, who is co-leading the NORLUX Neuro-Oncology laboratory with Professor Simone Niclou at the Luxembourg Institute of Health.
Kintara said the grant is intended to support Dr. Golebiewska's research on the mechanism of action for VAL-083's utility to treat GBM. Trained as a cellular and molecular biologist, she has been engaged in brain tumor research primarily focused on the biology of GBM with a special interest in tumor heterogeneity, plasticity, and tumor microenvironment.
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Along with co-investigator Dr. Petr Nazarov, Kintara said Dr. Golebiewska's research project is titled "Deconvolution of heterogeneity in the Glioblastoma cellular ecosystem for understanding treatment resistance and improving patient stratification (DIOMEDES)," and is based on complementary expertise in GBM biology and computational methods for the deconvolution of the complex biological systems associated with the disease.
By combining state-of-the-art preclinical models, transcriptomic analyses at the single and bulk cell level, and powerful deconvolution methods, the researchers aim to unravel mechanisms that shape treatment resistance in GBM.
The company said the researchers will assess transcriptomic changes upon treatment with Temozolomide (TMZ) and VAL-083 in their GBM patient-derived orthotopic xenografts (PDOXs).
Direct treatment of PDOXs will allow for the investigation of transcriptomic transitions towards resistant states at the moment of treatment. And this research may lead to improved stratification of patients for personalized therapies.
"The recognition and financial support from this esteemed organization to support VAL-083's research in Dr. Golebiewska's laboratory is extremely exciting as it will provide important data to optimize the clinical use of this first-in-class small molecule chemotherapeutic," said Dennis Brown, Kintara's chief scientific officer, in a statement.
"The findings from this research will help elucidate potential therapeutic targets for innovative combination treatment strategies that involve VAL-083 and importantly, further advance the opportunity to increase therapeutic precision when treating GBM patients."
Kintara said the DIOMEDES project, in addition to its other scientific collaborations with investigators at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, University of California San Francisco, and the University of British Columbia, have helped to refine the understanding of VAL-083's therapeutic potential as a treatment for multiple oncology indications -- including platinum-resistant ovarian cancer, pediatric cancers such as DIPG and Ewings sarcoma, as well as GBM.
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