Drugs discovery firm in potential breast cancer treatment breakthrough

Evgen Pharma, the AIM-isted clinical stage drug development company, said its long-standing collaboration with the University of Manchester has led to the discovery of a gene signature that may predict patient response to SFX-01 in advanced oestrogen receptor positive (ER+) breast cancer.

The pharma company, with offices in Wilmslow and Liverpool Science Park, is developing sulforaphane-based medicines for the treatment of multiple diseases.

Evgen and the university have previously shown that SFX-01 inhibits activity of STAT3, a transcription factor known to play a role in therapy resistance, and in the spread of the cancer around the body.

In this latest study, in hormone therapy-resistant patient tumours, SFX-01 was shown to inhibit expression of key STAT3-regulated genes.

This discovery yields further insight into the mechanism of action of SFX-01 and moves the company closer to determining which patients are most likely to respond favourably to treatment.

All the pre-clinical data accrued over the past eight years of this research collaboration is to be published later this year.

This follows a short preview of some of the data that was presented at last week’s UK Interdisciplinary Breast Cancer Symposium in Birmingham.

Evgen Pharma has previously announced positive results from the STEM trial of SFX-01 in metastatic breast cancer.

Patients who responded favourably to SFX-01 were able to access it post-trial and Evgen can now report that one patient had their progressive disease halted for a total of 597 days – an impressive duration in a very difficult to treat and terminally ill patient population.

Steve Franklin, Evgen Pharma chief executive, said: “This latest data from an eight-year collaboration with Manchester University, and the forthcoming publication, are very positive developments for both the design of future clinical trials and for supporting business development activity with potential partners.

“The University of Manchester have been tremendous collaborators and we would like to thank them for their continued commitment and enthusiasm.

“We continue to focus on our technical and commercial programmes in-line with the interim statement, and remain confident of the intrinsic value of SFX-01’s therapeutic application in breast cancer and other disease areas.

“We remain committed to building shareholder value as we pursue our clinical programme in breast cancer and potentially in other diseases via clinical trials sponsored by academic and clinical centres of excellence.”