Mestastop Solutions, a biotech company focused on stopping the spread of cancer, has been awarded a 2.66 Cr grant by BIRAC under the focused call of “establishment of preclinical models for drug discovery”. Mestastop will use the funds to develop both in vitro and in vivo models for metastasis-focused drug discovery, focusing on triple-negative breast and oral cancer. The grant in aid will complement Mestastop’s contribution of 1.21 Cr.
This grant comes at an exciting time for Mestastop, which plans to start its first Ph2A clinical trial in India next year and is also working on MOUs with European hospitals. The biotech is also working on drug discovery programmes, and its first hit series against a novel-first-in-class target has shown a 100% efficacy against metastasis in high-throughput in vivo models.
Dr Arnab Roy Chowdhury, the Founder and Director of Mestastop, said, “We have established groundbreaking technology for using actual colorectal cancer patient data to identify high-risk patients for personalised metastasis treatment and therefore offer a paradigm shift in cancer treatment, with a first-in-a-lifetime chance to cure the disease. We thank BIRAC for recognising the potential of this technology and funding us to enable this technology for both oral and triple-negative breast cancers, the two most common cancers in the Indian population”.
About Mestastop: Ninety per cent of cancer deaths are due to metastasis, and current drugs only progress survival by an average of 3.3 months. Mestastop is committed to understanding each patient’s personalised nature of metastasis and finding solutions to stop the metastatic process. Over the last five years, Mestastop has focused on deep tech R&D, creating three transformational platforms that unravel metastasis biology and pave the way for precise and faster therapeutics and diagnostics. The biotech has two subsidiaries, one in New Jersey, USA and the other in Brussels, Belgium.
About BIRAC: Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC) is a not-for-profit Section 8 company that plays a transformative and catalytic role in building a US$100 billion Indian bioeconomy. It was set up by the Department of Biotechnology (DBT), Government of India, as an interface agency to strengthen and empower emerging Biotech enterprises, particularly start-ups and SMEs, to undertake strategic research and innovation, addressing nationally relevant product development needs. In its twelve years of existence, BIRAC has initiated several schemes, networks and platforms that help to bridge the existing gaps in the industry-academia Innovation research and facilitate novel, high-quality, affordable product development through cutting-edge technologies.