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Lebanon firm makes cancer-screening agent

LEBANON – Woomera Therapeutics Inc. has entered a strategic partnership with a West Coast company to produce an antibody for clinical trial for use in detection and treatment of breast and small-cell lung cancers.

The company will create the monoclonal antibody this year, said CEO Roy Pang.

Dartmouth Medical School professor William North, graduate Brendan Keenan, and Pang, a past executive of multiple biotech and venture capital companies, founded Woomera in 2004. The company has secured $400,000 in venture capital to date and has produced a mouse-model antibody called MAG-1.

The New Hampshire Innovation Research Center has also granted the company in excess of $80,000. Woomera will use the grant to learn why MAG-1 is effective on breast and small-cell lung cancers and to screen other types of cancers for potential treatment with such an antibody, Pang said.

"The data is very encouraging," North said. "The antibody shrinks tumor cells in mice, and now we want to find out why this happens. We call this understanding the mechanism."

Woomera derived its insights into the cancer treatment from North's 35 years of research into vasopressin and oxytocin, hormones made in the brain that regulate water retention through action in the kidneys.

It turns out that vasopressin can also tell researchers a lot about some sorts of cancer. Breast and small-cell lung cancers produce abnormal vasopressin receptors and pro-vasopressin, a molecular precursor to the hormone, on membranes. North discovered these cancers express certain genes involved in making vasopressin and its receptor, and build pro-vasopressin onto the surface of cell membranes. Since no normal cells use pro-vasopressin to build membranes, it becomes an excellent marker for cancer.

Cancer cells' unique expression of pro-vasopressin in their cell walls means doctors can target cancer cells in treatment without harming healthy cells in the process, avoiding the collateral damage caused in radiation and chemotherapy, North said.

North said MAG-1 reduced breast cancer tumors in mice up to 50 percent.

The antibody did not reduce the size of small-cell lung cancer tumors, but did slow their growth and could be a candidate to treat recurrence, he said.

Genentech, Inc. of California already has a breast-cancer antibody on the market called Herceptin, a naked antibody that attaches to a receptor called HER2.

Receptors enable cancer cells to develop, and the most successful treatments on the market target three receptors: HER2, estrogen and progesterone receptors.

Breast-cancer drugs have been limited in their fight.

A 2001 report published in Nature Medicine showed only 20 to 30 percent of breast cancers produce HER2, meaning Herceptin is limited in the number of breast-cancer cases in which the drug can be effectively applied.

There is a pressing medical need for research and clinical trials.

In the U.S. there are 42,000 new cases of small-cell lung cancer per year with a six percent survival within five years, and 217,440 new cases of breast cancer with an 86 percent survival rate after five years.

North and Pang caution that their work so far has only been shown effective in mouse models, but say their findings are promising.

"In the mice we checked to see if the breast cancer returned, and found that it did not," Pang said.