Ramona Adams
SRI International will carry out pre-clinical studies on compounds and vaccines to determine if they can act as preventive agents against cancer under a $19.8 million contract with a National Institutes of Health center.
The company said Thursday its biosciences division will work to examine the effectiveness of experimental vaccines and test biomarkers in an effort to parallel how the body responds to treatment.
NIH’s National Cancer Institute has awarded SRI two task orders to develop a mesothelin-based vaccine against ovarian cancer and novel models to test how preventative agents act against the disease.
“Discovery and development of cancer preventative agents is an area that is underserved, primarily because the length of required clinical trials can be resource-prohibitive for many companies,” said Lidia Sambucetti, SRI Biosciences senior director for cancer biology, center for discovery technologies and principal investigator for the contract.
Sambucetti added the project aims to address this issue through the company’s biomarker discovery efforts in an effort to shorten the time of clinical trials.
SRI researchers are also working on a model to test experimental drugs to prevent ovarian cancer.
