MonTa Biosciences signs licensing agreement to develop cancer treatment
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The Danish biotech company MonTa Biosciences announces signing a licensing agreement with University of California San Diego to develop a new treatment that actively educates the body’s immune system to recognize and fight cancer.
MonTa Biosciences, a spin-out from DTU-Nanotech, is now taking their promising cancer treatment across the Atlantic with a new license agreement with University of California San Diego (UC San Diego). With this license agreement, MonTa Biosciences is a major step closer to the commercialization of their innovative immunotherapeutic treatment, which may be a game changer for the future cancer treatment. The immunotherapeutic treatment makes use of nanoparticles capable of delivering an immune-stimulating drug to the immune system, which enables the body’s immune system to recognize, attack and eliminate cancer cells.
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Worldwide exclusive license
“The new license agreement gives us exclusive worldwide rights and represents a major step towards commercializing our cancer treatment” says CEO Simon Skjøde Jensen (Ph.D.). “UC San Diego is one of the world’s leading specialists in this type of immune activating therapy, which involves compounds that activates the so-called Toll Like Receptor 7 (TLR7). The research group at UC San Diego is led by Professor Dennis Carson, who has worked with this class of compounds for several years, and showed remarkable anti-tumor activities in mouse models of cancer. The field of cancer immunotherapy and particularly the activation of the innate immune system is currently one of the most attractive and fastest developing therapeutic areas. The agreement is a very important milestone for our ability to treat patients effectively in the future, and to get the immune system to help the body fight cancer and especially metastases which are major problems for doctors and patients today.”
Mentoring providing access to US market
MonTa Biosciences is today part of NOME (Nordic Mentor Network for Entrepreneurship) initiated by the Novo Nordisk Foundation and Accelerace. Life science startups get there essential access to counseling from some of the most experienced biotech entrepreneurs and life science executives in the Nordic countries and the USA. The NOME responsible Accelerace Partner Peter Birk (Ph.D.) says: “MonTa Biosciences is a very promising life science startup and has reached many milestones in the development of their cancer treatment within a short period of time. The license agreement with UC San Diego accelerates the development of the startup company, and we have very high expectations for the talented team.”
The core technology of MonTa Biosciences was initiated as a research project at DTU and received a capital injection of €270,000 from Pre-seed Innovation in March 2017. MonTa Biosciences have previously raised an investment from the Danish Innovation Fund. The Biotech startup company is currently looking for additional investment and is attracting great interest from major pharmaceutical companies.
About MonTa Biosciences Aps
MonTa Biosciences is a Danish biotech company that has developed a new immunotherapeutic treatment of cancer. With MonTa Biosciences treatment, the body’s immune system can be trained to recognize and eliminate cancer cells so metastases in the patient are fought by the body’s immune system. Preliminary results show a very promising treatment, where the technology in models of cancer in mice can cure most of the mice. MonTa Biosciences is today part of the NOME accelerator program (Nordic Mentor Network for Entrepreneurship), an international mentoring network for particularly promising life science companies.
Read more about MonTa Biosciences here: http://montabiosciences.com
About Accelerace and NOME
Accelerace is one of the world’s top 10 seed accelerators. Since 2008, they have spotted, trained and invested in more than 500 of the most promising Danish and international startups and growth companies. 88% of the companies are still on the market today. As part of the national Scale-up Denmark initiative, Accelerace is scaling up startups within tech, foodtech, cleantech, life sciences and health care technologies through guidance and mentoring from skilled serial entrepreneurs, camps and network. Accelerace has invested in more than 69 promising startups, who have been through the Accelerace program and have started partnerships with Maersk, Novo Nordisk Foundation. Arla, Foss, NRGI, Business Lolland-Falster, Bang & Olufsen, SE, Endesa & Enel. Accelerace is also organizing the Nordic NOME (Nordic Mentor Network for Entrepreneurship) mentor network for life science startups. Read more on www.accelerace.io and www.nome.nu