After almost two decades of work, and after achieving a development promising For a molecule that can become the basis for future cancer treatments, the Conicet gave him the “witness” of research to a multinational laboratory. from now on the team of the GSK company It will be the one that, with the help and validation of Argentine researchers, will be in charge of coordinating the next steps to determine in detail the possibilities offered by the use of this monoclonal foundation.
The compound is a monoclonal motifs, baptized “anti-MICA”and an important capacity to mark tumor cells has already appeared – for now exclusively in laboratory tests – which can make it the basis of a potential cancer treatment.
According to information from the Conicet authorities in the act of signing the license agreement, “this action of public-private cooperation in scientific matters aims to develop a new immunotherapy for cancer that already showed encouraging results in the preclinical phase”. In fact, according to the documents published so far, this technology emerged to be able to delay the growth of tumors by acting directly on MICA, which are a type of protein that researchers found expressed on the outer surface of cells of various solid tumors.
The future of the agreement exemplifies in detail How does the scientific process work today? The original idea of the development came from -in the year 2000- the researcher of the Institute of Biology and Experimental Medicine Norberto Zwirner.
Later, another researcher, Mercedes Fuertes, joined this work, and between them they advanced the idea and the experiments that began as “basic” science towards -two decades later- a concrete translational medicine objective and now closer in time, where a “heavyweight” from global laboratories is interested in the subject and takes the post to test and fine-tune a new treatment.
The interesting detail from the point of view of science policy is that this is the first license that a multinational such as GSK has agreed with a science body and technology in the region and is the first company in the field to obtain a license in Latin America to develop new proven monoclonals.
As Zwirner told PROFILE, “the first tests will be done to see how effective this works against kidney tumors. But we think that, in the future, it could also be used as transport to combat other solid tumors that express the Mica protein on their cell surface”.
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