Mestastop Solutions Pvt Ltd, a pioneering startup biotech working on complex cancer metastasis biology, has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Bangalore Bioinnovation Centre (BBC), India’s premier Bio Incubator. Together these two parties intend to collaborate to integrate the “Drosophila Technology Platform” of BBC into the proprietary Mestastop platforms. The first scope of this will be conceptualising and validating a Drosophila platform for cancer metastasis drug screening.
Under this agreement, BBC will provide access to instrumentation and infrastructure facilities to the researchers of both parties to carry out the research work as per the programme’s requirements, and Mestastop will provide their expertise to the BBC researchers. Dr Reeta Singh, PhD, IIT Kanpur, and Scientific Manager, BBC, will lead the programme. Both parties will remain the sole owner of their intellectual properties generated to date and have agreed to share any new IP generated from the collaboration jointly.
Speaking on this, Dr Reeta Singh, the program lead, said, “Flies being the human miniatures along with their genetic tractability has immensely contributed to disease modelling where one can customise the model as per need and indeed, cancer metastasis is one of them. We take this collaborative opportunity to showcase Drosophila models as a drug discovery platform to the real world”. Echoing similar sentiments, Dr Veeranna S, acting MD, BBC, added, “Developing Drosophila technology platform to facilitate in-house startups fulfilling their early research objectives was a very visionary initiative by our former MD Dr Jitendra Kumar (present MD-BIRAC). In the future, we aim to create more technology platforms to grow and support the echo system ”.
Dr Arnab Roy Chowdhury, Founder of Mestastop, said, “We have been very impressed with the excellent Drosophila facility developed by the BBC team, led by Dr Singh and are very excited about this collaboration. We are confident that the joint expertise will result in fascinating scientific applications that empower anti-metastasis research”.
BANGALORE BIOINNOVATION CENTRE (BBC), a section 8 Company having its registered office at Helix Biotech Park, Electronic City Phase 1, Bangalore – 560100 and a bio-incubation centre for startups in the field of Life Sciences, Pharma, MedTech, Agriculture, Food & Nutrition funded by Dept. of Electronics, IT, BT and S&T, Govt. of Karnataka with liberal funding support from Department of Biotechnology (DBT) Government of India. BBC strives towards promoting bio innovations and serves as a centre for profound science-based discovery driving the growth of products and fostering bio-based startups pan-India. BBC, a SIRO-recognized organisation, is currently taking up in-house research work and translating it into scientific and social impact products. BBC is equipped with the scientific personnel’s expertise in biochemistry, molecular biology, Drosophila disease modelling and drug screening.
Mestastop Solutions® is a deep-dive biotech startup focussed on cancer metastasis, which involves the spreading of the tumour and is responsible for 90% of cancer deaths. Mestastop believes that Biopharma cannot holistically target an evolutionary disease like cancer without targeting metastasis, a complex biological process. Mestastop has developed three proprietary platforms, METAssay®, METSCAN®, and METVivo®, to address metastasis drug discovery and predictive diagnostics. The platforms are validated in prospective and retrospective clinical studies and presented in international conferences; PCT applications are pending approval. The company is extending the platform into multiple epithelial carcinomas and a drug repurposing initiative METGuard®.