Fireships

So, in malignancies there is an overexpression of La, which is a highly abundant protein anyway. This discovery has prompted the development of Oncaidia's mAb as a diagnostic tool for clinicians and potentially as a new cancer treatment.

In addition, La is even further upregulated when cells enter apoptosis, a feature that can be used by clinicians to test whether conventional chemotherapy is working. Another goal, of course, is the hope that it can be developed as a therapeutic, by tracking down dead and dying cells and delivering a radionuclide to the surrounding live cancer cells.

Brown likes to use the analogy of Elizabethan fireships, thought to have been used by Francis Drake against the Spanish Armada in 1588. The hulks of wrecked ships were filled with pitch, set alight and sent in to disrupt the enemy ships' formation.

"The hulk is the dead cell - we set it alight to affect the other ships in the formation," Brown says.

The team has also undertaken experiments with histone deacetylase inhibitors, now being explored for their pro-apoptopic effects. "We find that effect that we have is maintained," Brown says.

"The dogma being that one of the hallmarks of cancer is the evasion of apoptosis. However, these new classes of drugs, when used in conjuction with conventional treatments, do increase the rate of apoptosis. We think that will be to the advantage of our product.

"We haven't explored all of the ways in which you can induce apoptosis - we've looked mainly at intrinsic rather than extrinsic pathways. There are new agents, for example TRAIL by Genentech, which we haven't fully explored yet." (TRAIL is a pro-apoptopic agonist designed to activate two receptors, DR4 and DR5.)

Also overexpressed in tumours is transglutimase 2 (TG2), an enzyme that gets switched on during apoptosis and stabilises dying cells by crosslinking the proteins inside with covalent bonds.

Brown believes that this protein-protein crosslinking will add to the technology's effectiveness as the monoclonal antibody as well as its target antigen appears to be crosslinked in the dying cancer cell.

In addition to the Apomab technology, Oncaidia also owns other intellectual property relating to the telomerase enzyme and its role in cancer, Keith Smith says. At the moment, however, Oncaidia is focusing on the Apomab technology.

"We need to be focused on this, and as funds become available we will give more attention to other technologies, but from a corporate perspective we don't want to be seen as having a single platform, and we don't," he says. "We are looking at other licences as well, as we intend to build a cancer company."