NEW YORK – Kintara Therapeutics on Wednesday said that a grant from the Luxembourg National Research Fund and Cancer Foundation Luxembourg will support efforts to further elucidate the mechanism of action of its chemotherapeutic VAL-083 and how glioblastoma may develop resistance to it.
The FNR and Cancer Foundation Luxembourg have awarded the funds to Anna Golebiewska, who co-leads the NORLUX Neuro-Oncology lab at the Luxembourg Institute of Health. The funds will allow Golebiewska and co-investigator Petr Nazarov to study VAL-083's mechanism of action against GBM, and their learnings may eventually help other researchers and Kintara mitigate therapeutic resistance and better stratify patients in personalized cancer medicine trials.
The researchers will conduct transcriptomic analysis at the single- and bulk-cell level and apply deconvolution methods to map resistance mechanisms in GBM upon treatment with temozolomide and VAL-083 in patient-derived orthotopic xenografts.
"The recognition and financial support from this esteemed organization to support VAL-083's research in Dr. Golebiewska's laboratory … will provide important data to optimize the clinical use of this first-in-class small molecule chemotherapeutic," Kintara CSO Dennis Brown said in a statement. "The findings from this research will help elucidate potential therapeutic targets for innovative combination treatment strategies that involve VAL-083 and importantly, further advance the opportunity to increase therapeutic precision when treating GBM patients."
Researchers are also studying VAL-083 within the GBM AGILE trial, a platform study sponsored by the Global Coalition for Adaptive Research, which allows for the simultaneous evaluation of multiple therapies. Kintara's drug is being evaluated in newly diagnosed patients with both unmethylated and methylated MGMT glioblastoma.
The San Diego-based company hopes that data from GBM AGILE will support the development and commercialization of VAL-083 for GBM. Outside of brain cancer, VAL-083 has also shown activity against other tumor types in NCI-sponsored trials including in non-small cell lung cancer, bladder cancer, and head and neck cancer.