Georgetown University Medical Center licenses 'theranostic' for development

GUMC's license agreement with BioMetrx, LLC, a Maryland-headquartered biotechnology company, expedites the translation of the agent, Rasstore™, from the laboratory to the clinical setting for further investigation as a potential new therapy.

Rasstore is named for the novel way it could potentially restore the body's natural ability to suppress tumor cells, utilizing the tumor suppressor gene RASSF1A. The agent was invented by Milton Brown, M.D., Ph.D., director of GUMC's Drug Discovery Program, and Partha Banerjee, Ph.D., a world recognized expert on RASSF1A and tumor suppression, also at GUMC.

"It's rewarding for Partha and me to see an agent progress from concept to where we are today – on the verge of completing pre-clinical IND enabling studies for a new agent which we believe has applications in prostate cancer and possibly other cancers as well," said Brown, who holds the Edwin H. Richard and Elisabeth Richard von Matsch Endowed Chair in Experimental Therapeutics and is an associate professor at Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center.

"Rasstore exemplifies the high-quality, early-stage technologies emerging from Georgetown's robust drug discovery program," says Claudia Stewart, vice president of technology commercialization at Georgetown. "Our commercial relationship with BioMetrx represents the process in universities that harnesses the enthusiasm of seasoned entrepreneurs who form a company around the technology, raise funds and then leverage the technical expertise of the inventors to advance the technology...the start up process."

BioMetrx has begun raising the capital required to support clinical investigation.

"We believe Rasstore will be very attractive to other pharmaceutical companies," says John Wells, BioMetrx's Executive Vice President for Global Operations. "This agent has the potential to enhance existing therapeutics because of its potential to restore the body's natural tumor suppression capability."

Provided by Georgetown University Medical Center