Federal grants to fund liver cancer, tissue repair and skin disease projects

Two projects from The University of Western Australia have received National Health and Medical Research Council Development Grants to evaluate new RNA-based therapeutics for liver cancer and develop a drug to modify tissue repair and inflammatory skin disease.

UWA Professor Peter Leedman, Director of the Harry Perkins Institute of Medical Research, said liver cancer was rapidly becoming one of the hardest to treat cancers with a poor prognosis and few treatment options.

“New treatments are urgently needed and the world of RNA-technology is providing opportunities for novel therapies,” Professor Leedman said. “This $483,000 grant will help to evaluate one such drug.”

RNA molecules in a cell carry instructions for making proteins. They can also help genes turn on and off, aid chemical reactions, alter other RNAs, and even build proteins.

“We are developing an RNA-based drug to treat liver cancer which, if successful, would potentially change the way patients are treated and improve their outcomes,” Professor Leedman said.

“The RNA drug, called mRx-7, inhibits the growth of liver cancer cells. The grant allows a highly-collaborative team from Perth, Sydney, Texas and Vancouver, to test mRx-7 alone and in combination with other standard-of-care treatments and to evaluate how well it is tolerated.”

This project will evaluate how effective the new drug is and develop some of the essential data needed to progress it to a clinical trial

Chief investigator Associate Professor Mark Fear and Professor Fiona Wood, from UWA’s Burn Injury Research Unit, also received $590,264 to develop a new treatment for tissue repair and inflammatory skin disease.

Slow tissue repair, excessive scarring and many skin diseases are driven by the body’s inappropriate or excessive immune response to the injury or environmental trigger. A family of enzymes, known as serine proteases, play a key role in this process.

Associate Professor Fear said they were developing a new drug that could target these serine proteases and aimed to generate data to support the first in human trials of the drug at the end of the study.

“It is great to be working with a new compound and drug target with Pharmaxis to modify tissue repair and inflammatory skin disease,” he said.

“As our previous collaboration now moves an anti-fibrotic drug into clinical trials, this new grant gives us an opportunity to target a new pathway with the potential to improve the healing trajectory for patients, reducing time in hospital and improving their outcomes.”

/University Release. View in full here.