[Music] So, today’s presentation I should mention
to Dr. Kester is the fourth award of non-formula CURE funding in recent years to the Penn State
College of Medicine; totals more than 12 Million dollars and supplements the roughly 70 million
dollars in formula funding received since the CURE program inception.
This of course advanced medical research right here in Central Pennsylvania.
These investments in health science at Penn State yield significant impact both on the
Commonwealth as a whole and our local economy.
For the past decade for example, formula and non-formula funds have supported over 100
scientists and research technicians at Penn State Hershey, generating over 174 million
dollars in business activity for our regional economy.
Looked at in one way, the way we research accountants look at it, the return on investment
for these funds are between 4 and 7 to 1 over the years.
The little dirty secret is chemotherapeutics, the drugs, are stupid.
They only go after proliferating cells that’s your cancer, but that’s also your hair,
your gut, your white blood cells; those are all of your side effects.
We really donate have medications that go after the mutated proteins driving only the
cancer.
Everybody talks about personalized medicine; here at the Penn State College of Medicine
we actually now now have an Institute of Personalized Medicine.
And we are going to look at all of your genes, especially the genes that are driving your
cancer, your inflammatory disease, your cardiovascular event.
And we’re going to take that information and use it.
And one of the ways we are going to use it, we are going to look at what mutated genes
you have and hopefully we’re going to design medications that will only attack the mutated
proteins, the proteins that are driving your cancer.
And with personalized medicine, we will be able to say these are the mutated proteins
we want to attack with drugs.
The problem is, we don’t have many drugs that truly attack mutated proteins and only
attack the mutated proteins.
One of the ways to go after these mutated proteins is using something called siRNA.
Basically, it’s a little piece of RNA that stops the production of mutated proteins.
It may be the way we prescribe drugs in the next 5 to 10 years and truly attack only the
growing mutated proteins that drive the cancer.
The problem is, these siRNS’s are very toxic; they’re immunogenic and they will never
be drugs.
So how do you actually give something toxic to the human body?
One of the ways is to encapsulate it within nanotechnology.
And what we are doing is, we are going after a specific mutated protein that’s over expressed
in a great number of women who have breast cancer.
It’s called PI3-Kinase CA.
It’s a mutated protein that drives the cancer and drives this type of breast cancer.
We can encapsulate the siRNA and directe it to this mutated protein, this PI3-Kinase CA,
in the nanojacket and it seems to work.
The goal of nanojacket, actually Nature and Medicine called it nanojacket because they
said these technologies are dressed to kill.
We thought that was cool so we trademarked it.
[Laughter] And I want to really also say that this is an academic industrial partnership.
The ideas come from my lab are also from Dr. Jim Adair’s lab, who’s up at University
Park.
Dr. Jim Adair who’s a professor in the College of Engineering and myself, cofound the company
6 years ago, we call it Keystone Nano, we brought in Jeff Davidson as our CEO and we
work with Keystone Nano in-lockstep.
So, it’s truly and academic industrial partnership.
I’m going to do a lot of the assays to see how our drug works.
Jim Adair is going to do a lot of the nanotechnology to better encapsulate siRNA within the nanojacket.
And Keystone Nano, the company is going to do the scale up, the manufacturing this at
scale and helping us do with contract research organizations to complete the preclinical
package that will get us in front of the FDA with an IND within a years and a half.
That’s what we are using your money for and we hope to leverage it well beyond 3 to
1 or 4 to 1 because I believe truly that nanotechnology offers the ability to see the promise of personalized
medicine and to attack specific cancers and only those cancers.