Onxeo Announces Formation of Scientific Advisory Committee of Leading Independent Experts
This newly formed committee of international specialists will advise on the scientific and clinical aspects related to the development of Onxeo’s current and future programs
Paris (France), May 31, 2021 – 7 am CEST - Onxeo S.A. (Euronext Growth Paris: ALONX, Nasdaq First North: ONXEO), « Onxeo », a clinical-stage biotechnology company specializing in the development of innovative drugs targeting tumor DNA Damage response (DDR) in oncology, today announced the formation of a new Scientific Advisory Committee of leading scientific and clinical experts in the fields of DDR, resistance to treatment and more globally, drug development in oncology. The Committee will advise and guide the Company as it advances its proprietary platform of compounds in the DDR field and develops innovative therapeutics that address unmet medical needs and improve the management of cancer patients.
“We feel excited and privileged to be able to work with this eminent group of renowned thought leaders in oncology,” said Judith Greciet, Chief Executive Officer of Onxeo. “Their scientific advice and clinical expertise will be extremely useful to determine the best development strategies for AsiDNA™ and to leverage its unique properties. Furthermore, their support will be particularly valuable to design new and differentiated candidates from our platON™ platform in order to enrich our pipeline of decoy agonists.”
Gilbert Chu, MD, PhD, Professor of Medicine (Oncology) and Biochemistry at the Stanford Medical School, commented: “The decoy-agonist technology that Onxeo is developing is a very promising new approach which consists in hijacking the DNA damage response for cancer treatment. AsiDNA™ presents appealing and original anti-tumoral properties which could lead to new therapeutic strategies, particularly for cancers with a high unmet medical need.”
Gilles Favre, PharmD, Medical Biologist, PhD, Director of CRCT (Toulouse Research Center in Cancerology), concluded: “Onxeo is addressing a major unmet need in cancer treatment that is prevention or reversal of tumor drug resistance. The early work performed by our team on combining AsiDNA™ with targeted therapies has shown promising results and I look forward to help advance these developments with my distinguished colleagues.”
The Scientific Advisory Committee will be comprised of the following members:
Gilbert Chu, MD, PhD, is Professor of Medicine (Oncology) and Biochemistry at the Stanford Medical School. He received a B.A. in Physics from Princeton University in 1967, a Ph.D. in Physics from M.I.T. in 1973, and an M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1980. Gilbert Chu joined the Stanford faculty in 1987. His notable contributions include discovering and characterizing proteins involved in DNA repair and developing instrumentation for assessing toxicity associated with cancer chemotherapy. His research has also investigated how cells react to DNA damage from radiation and chemotherapy.
Gilles Favre, PharmD, Medical Biologist, PhD, Director of the CRCT (Toulouse Research Center in Cancerology), is currently Professor of Biochemistry and Medical Biology at the University of Toulouse and director of the Clinical and Genetic Oncology Laboratory Medicine at the Institut Universitaire du Cancer de Toulouse-Oncopole for which he serves as the scientific director. His research focuses on cancer cell signaling leading to therapeutic targets identification and translational medicine-based approaches to discover novel biomarkers. Recently, his work was focused on reversing resistance to targeted therapy in lung cancers and melanomas.
Lorenzo Galluzzi, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Cell Biology in Radiation Oncology with the Department of Radiation Oncology of the Weill Cornell Medical College (New York, NY, USA), Honorary Assistant Professor Adjunct at the Yale School of Medicine (New Haven, CT, USA), Honorary Associate Professor with the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Paris (Paris, France), and Faculty Member with several universities in Italy (Ferrara, Padova, Rome). Lorenzo Galluzzi is best known for major experimental and conceptual contributions to the fields of tumor metabolism and tumor immunology, the links between adaptive stress responses in cancer cells and the activation of a clinically relevant tumor-targeting immune response.
Ruth Plummer, FMedSci, MD, PhD, is Professor of Experimental Cancer Medicine at the Northern Institute for Cancer Research, Newcastle University and an Honorary Consultant in Medical Oncology in Newcastle Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. She leads the Newcastle Experimental Cancer Medicine Centre and also the CRUK Newcastle Cancer Centre. She runs a phase I all-comers practice, taking responsibility for one of the most active phase I unit’s in the UK. Her research interests are in the field of DNA repair and early phase clinical trials of novel agents, taking the first in class PARP inhibitor into the clinic in 2003, ATR inhibitor in 2012 and MCT1 inhibitor in 2014. Her work contributed to the development and validation of pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic assays in early clinical drug development, assays that are now embedded in early phase trial design.
Caroline Robert, M.D., Ph.D., is the Head of the Dermatology Unit at Gustave Roussy and co-director of the Melanoma Research Unit at Paris-Sud University. She trained at the Paris V University, France, and completed a research fellowship at Harvard, Brigham & Women’s hospital in Cancer Immunology and Immunotherapy. Her main focuses of interest are clinical and translational research on immunotherapy and targeted therapy. Caroline Robert is national and international coordinator of many clinical trials of targeted therapy and immunotherapy from phase I to III. Her recent work has focused on identification of new biomarkers for immunotherapy and targeted therapies of patients with melanoma.