University of Virginia Health System has partnered with HemoShear Therapeutics to create individualized and advanced cancer treatments.
UVA will use Charlottesville, Va.-based HemoShear's technology to develop new tumor models as well as continue the company's work on current tumor models in an effort to better understand the tumors themselves and how to treat them more effectively, according to a news release.
So far, HemoShear has created models for non-small cell carcinoma and pancreatic cancer with the help of UVA associate professor Dr. Dan Gioeli, who is also the former senior scientific director at HemoShear. Gioeli will continue to oversee the cancer model research at UVA at his research laboratory.
“I am very excited to continue my work with the HemoShear platform to better understand complex cancer biology,” Gioeli said in the release. “Our goal is to one day use these models to develop optimal treatments for specific individuals' tumors.”
According to HemoShear's Chairman and CEO Jim Powers, the technology helps researchers recreate human tumor biology, which will facilitate more successful drug research and discovery, as current animal-based research doesn't create very good models for human disease. HemoShear has primarily focused on children's rare diseases in the liver, and Powers says the first drug should be in clinical testing next year.
“We'll be developing the most advanced models of human tumor biology to get deeper and more accurate insight on how disease works and how to treat cancers better,” Powers said.
A spokesman for UVA Health System said the HemoShear partnership will primarily focus on the non-small cell lung cancer model, but noted Gioeli's long-standing research could facilitate tumor models for prostate and kidney cancer as well as head and neck squamous cell carcinoma.
HemoShear can license any treatments created under the research partnership. HemoShear has also partnered with a Virginia Commonwealth University professor to work on nonalcoholic steatohepatitis, and Pfizer to create a model for preclinical drug-induced vascular injury, according to its website.
