UA Licenses Technology to Suppress Acute Myeloid Leukemia to Startup
TUCSON, Ariz. – Researchers at the University of Arizona, in collaboration with the University of California San Francisco, have developed a new treatment for acute myeloid leukemia (AML), a type of leukemia which the American Cancer Society estimates will represent over 19,950 of the 60,140 new leukemia cases diagnosed in 2016.
The team of inventors includes Hong-yu Li, Ph.D.(link is external), who was a professor in the UA College of Pharmacy at the time of the invention; Brendan Frett, Ph.D., graduate of the College of Pharmacy; and Neil Shah(link is external), M.D., Ph.D. of USCF.
Li and Frett have formed a startup company – Promutech Pharmaceuticals, Inc. – to further develop and commercialize the treatment.
The goal is to develop therapies that will be capable of prolonging the productive lives of AML patients and potentially patients of other related cancers like lymphomas and myelomas by effectively suppressing disease promotion and resistance.
The team originally brought their invention – a set of two next-generation precision medicine treatments – to Tech Launch Arizona (TLA), the office of the UA that commercializes the inventions stemming from research, in 2013. Through TLA’s collaboration with the inventors, the UA has protected the technology, and Promutech has now licensed the intellectual property from the University.
The company will use the compounds to identify therapeutics capable of blocking mutated FLT3 oncogenes that can promote the transformation of a normal cell into a cancer cell.
Frett is serving as the CEO of the new company, which has been granted a Phase 1 STTR grant for $285,000 to move the technology forward.
“Through an academic collaboration with the UA and UCSF, we have uncovered potential therapeutic breakthroughs that can extend the productive lives of AML patients,” says Frett. “This showcases the power of collaborative research and the ingenuity emanating from academia.”
“The current standard of treatment for AML is chemotherapy followed by stem cell and bone marrow transplants,” says Tech Launch Arizona Associate Director of Biomedical and Life Sciences Licensing Rakhi Gibbons. “Promutech’s proposed therapies may reduce or eliminate the need for those more intrusive treatments.”
Photo: Dr. Brendan Frett in a lab at the Arizona Center for Innovation at the UA Tech Park. Photo credit: Paul Tumarkin/Tech Launch Arizona.