Novogen forms ovarian cancer JV

Novogen (ASX:NRT) has formed a joint venture with Yale University dedicated to developing chemotherapeutic treatments for ovarian cancer.

The joint venture, CanTx, will be 85% owned by Novogen, and Novogen CEO Dr Graham Kelly will also lead up the new company.

Dr Gil Mor, professor of obstetrics and gynecology and reproductive science at Yale University School of Medicine, will co-lead clinical development work at the joint venture. Mor was the first researcher to isolate ovarian cancer stem cells.

CanTx will take responsibility for advancing ovarian cancer drugs based on Novogen’s super-benzopryan technology into the clinic.

The first planned product will be designed to be administered intraperitoneally and deliver a payload of a Novogen drug that is highly cytotoxic against ovarian cancer cells - including cancer stem cells. This product is due to enter the clinic next year.

Dr Mor said a new approach to treating ovarian cancer is urgently needed: “Current chemotherapy unfortunately only does half the job. It is reasonably effective at killing the predominant somatic cancer cells, but by not killing the cancer stem cells, the cancer is highly likely to recur.”

He said Novogen’s super-benzopyran drugs have demonstrated a high degree of activity against ovarian cancer stem cells “where no other approach has worked in our experience to date. We believe that by combining this powerful new personalised approach with our unique drug delivery model, we may be able to treat ovarian cancer and prevent its recurrence.”

The intraperitoneal delivery method developed at Yale has been shown to allow the entire dose of an injected drug to reach its target in mice. This compares to intravenous injections, where typically only around 3% of the drug payload reaches the tumour.

Dr Kelly said that longer-term, the joint venture will aim to provide personalised chemotherapy for ovarian cancer patients.

“To achieve this lofty goal, you need two fundamentals - the ability to extract the cancer stem cells from an individual cancer in order to assess the sensitivity of an individual tumour to drugs [and] to have the drugs that can be modified to work across individual tumour genotypes. Yale and Novogen are uniquely positioned in having these two fundamentals.”

Novogen (ASX:NRT) shares were trading 10% lower at $0.225 as of around 3 pm on Thursday.