A Hillsboro lab dedicated to finding cures for childhood cancer will receive a $2.5 million grant over five years, as part of a $25 million global initiative to develop new therapies for currently incurable solid tumors in children.
The Children’s Cancer Therapy Development Institute (CC-TDI) on Wednesday announced that it is partnering with Team KOODAC, which stands for “Knock Out Oncogenic Drivers and Curing Childhood Cancer.”
The consortium will receive the grant in May from the Cancer Grand Challenges, which is funded jointly by Cancer Research UK and the National Cancer Institute.
The interdisciplinary KOODAC team consists of five research organizations, led by researchers at the University of Wurzburg in Germany and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
CC-TDI’s role is developing a novel kind of drug, called a protein degrader, for childhood cancer with a Bay Area-based field leader, Nurix Therapeutics. They will focus on developing therapeutics to primarily target two sarcoma types that have not previously responded to drugs. The goal is to start a clinical trial in five years, said Dr. Charles Keller, a former researcher at OHSU who founded the nonprofit CC-TDI in 2015.
“It’s a grant of a substantial amount that will have an actual clinical trial that might have a cure for a disease that hasn’t had one,” said Keller, who was in London for the announcement. “It’s also the beginning of our computational drug design, as part of our engineering-forward initiative. We’re in with all feet now on deciding the path for treatment for childhood cancers.”
The grant builds on work CC-TDI has already been doing on protein degraders.
“Hopefully, this will lead to a whole new class of therapies available for childhood cancer and have an impact on outcomes, too,” said Claire Newman, a retired Intel executive serving as a Social Venture Partners Portland Encore Fellow at CC-TDI.
Keller said CC-TDI was previously awarded a National Cancer Institute grant for $140,000 for preliminary work on the project but needed more support. That was made possible when the father of a child whom Keller helped get a correct cancer diagnosis introduced him to the CEO of Nurix. Keller said his goal is to help "kids like Xander get better outcomes."
Keller has said he started his lab because the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had signed off on only six therapies for childhood cancers since 1978.
CC-TDI has completed a Phase 1 clinical trial on a related drug, and is in planning for Phase 2. The scientist who co-developed the new technology approach for protein degraders is at the University of Dundee and also shares a connection with Nurix, which was also working on protein degraders, Keller said.
The lab, with fewer than 20 employees, some biologists and some engineers, recently moved to a new space in the “Silicon Forest” part of Hillsboro, not far from Intel and Genentech. It operates on an annual budget of about $2.5 million to $3 million. Keller described the five-year grant, at more than $500,000 per year, as “a pretty substantial part of our bandwidth.”
Other KOODAC collaborators include the Curie Institute in France, the University of Dundee in Scotland, MIT, UC-San Francisco, the Austrian Academy of Sciences and Rockefeller Institute.
