Purposeful cell targeting delivers commercial spoils for Phylogica

Biotech company Phylogica (ASX: PYC) has announced it has developed a new recombination enzyme, Cre, thereby supplementing its ongoing research into a proprietary in vitro drug delivery platform.

Phylogica says its novel development is “well validated” and routinely used in biological research.

Phylogica is currently developing the next generation of intracellular biological therapeutics which it hopes can lead to strong commercial results over the near-medium term.

Its broader oncology pipeline includes four distinct programs currently in progress. The most advanced is iMyc, a “transcription factor oncogene” that can potentially inhibit AML, breast cancer and neuroblastoma related tumours.

According to Phylogica, Cre is an important step in establishing “an in vivo system to determine where in the body a drug cargo goes with Phylogica’s Functional Penetrating Phylomer (FPP) delivery technology.”

The Cre system is able to mark particular cells and organs in different colours in order to identify particular areas of interest for follow-up procedures and to enable better targeting for other treatments.

Successful delivery of the Cre enzyme induces a colour change in cells and organs and thereby supplements Phylogica’s overarching FPP delivery technology, a unique drug delivery platform capable of deploying solutions for a range of life-threatening diseases.

For the time being, Phylogica has demonstrated the successful delivery of Cre using its FPP technology into kidney cells in vitro but intends to develop its biotech solution further in order to be applicable to other organs and cell types.

Dr Robert Hayes, Chief Scientific Officer of Phylogica said that “the Cre system will significantly reduce testing time, cutting in half the current testing regime to determine where in the body a FPP is taking the biologic cargo. This work also shows that the FPP1746-Cre gets into the nucleus of the cell.”

According to Stephanie Unwin, CEO of Phylogica, “the successful delivery of a Cre cargo is a great result for our company and does three important things. First, it demonstrates that we can deliver an enzyme into kidney cells in vitro.”

“Secondly, it is a significant step achieved for our team ahead of using the live animal system for testing the delivery of drugs into the body and gives potential Pharma customers the confidence that Phylogica can deliver their drugs in a targeted way.”

“Thirdly, our data once again shows clear outperformance of FPPs over the current delivery standard TAT, with over 50% more uptake into cells using our technology.”