Tucson - Luceome Biotechnology to speed development of cancer drugs

BIOTECH GETS UA-OWNED PATENT
Spinoff seeks safer drugs
Wife, husband use savings to develop product that can help in cancer fight

By Dan Sullivan
ARIZONA DAILY STAR

A University of Arizona spinoff com­pany started by a husband-and-wife team is marketing a new technology aimed at making cancer drugs safer.

Luceome Biotechnologies is develop­ing a product dubbed KinaseSeeker that is available to academic labs and drug companies to help speed cancer drug de­velopment.

The company was started by Reena Zutshi and her husband, Indraneel Ghosh.

Zutshi, former operations vice presi­dent at Tucson-based ImaRx Therapeu­tics, is the company’s president and CEO. Ghosh — an associate professor of chem­­istry and biochemistry and a member of the UA’s Bio5 biotechnology institute — is the chief scientific officer.

Luceome struck a deal with the UA’s Office of Technology Transfer to get ex­clusive rights to the UA-owned patent.

Launching a company like Luceome is good for Arizona, especially in such hard economic times, Ghosh said.

The biosciences industry directly con­tributed $12.5 billion to the state’s econo­my in 2007, according to a report by the Battelle Technology Partnership Practice.

KinaseSeeker works during a drug’s discovery phase, before it’s tested on hu­mans or animals, in order to prevent any negative side effects from chemotherapy, Zutshi said.

The technology works by analyzing organic compounds targeted as potential drugs against a range of kinases — en­zymes that act on specific proteins to transmit signals and control complex processes in cells.

The process gives pharmaceutical companies a fast and effective way to evaluate potential drugs, ultimately help­ing bring safer drugs to the marketplace, Zutshi said.

“It’s a powerful technology,” she said. Luceome has also priced its serv­ices competitively compared to companies developing similar tech­nologies, Zutshi said. KinaseSeeker can also produce information in two to three days, whereas competitors take two to three weeks, she said.

“Our goal is to make the process cheap and available,” Ghosh said. “We think we are faster and cheaper than what’s available.”

It’s not just about finding what drugs are the best and most active, Zutshi said. Rather, it’s a matter of finding what doesn’t work and making it fail so compa­nies aren’t wasting time and money.

KinaseSeeker may be used in the future to help develop drugs to treat heart disease and diabetes, Ghosh said.

To get their company started, the couple — who married during graduate school at Yale — invested their per­sonal savings and didn’t receive out­side funding.

Companies like Luceome are right on track with the biosciences road map, said Patrick Jones, director of the UA’s tech­transfer office. “We’re very excited about them because they have a skilled plan and good man­agement,” Jones said. “They have the potential to change how drug development is done.”

Contact NASA Space Grant intern Dan Sullivan at 573-4237 or dsulliva@azstarnet.com.