Sapience Therapeutics, a Harrison-based company that is involved in developing drugs to treat cancer, has been awarded a second Small Business Innovative Research grant from the federal government”™s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of the National Institutes of Health.
Sapience Therapeutics received $299,860 for fiscal year 2021. It had previously received a grant of $255,240 for fiscal year 2020.
The new grant will provide funds over two years to support the discovery and development of peptide therapeutics against coronaviruses, including the Covid-19 virus, SARS-CoV-2.
The company has been researching ways to attack cancerous tumors that cannot be removed surgically and have been resistant to treatment with drugs. It has focused on using peptides, chains of amino acids that can be made to attack certain cancer cells.
Sapience has developed a compound known as ST101. The company reported that the compound has been shown to selectively cause toxicity in cancer across a variety of tumor types, such as found in breast, prostate and lung cancer.
A clinical trial is underway on patients who have metastatic tumors (tumors that have spread) and are inoperable. Separately, it is collaborating with NIH”™s National Cancer Institute to study the ST101 compound. Sapience and NCI will investigate the impact of ST101 on primary and metastatic cancer and the tumor microenvironment.
