BioAlliance Pharma SA, the specialty pharmaceutical company focused on the treatment of opportunistic infections in cancer and AIDS, announced the award of €6.4 million in funding from OSEO (the French state innovation agency). The company will devote the funds to the development of its novel therapeutic entities for the treatment of invasive cancers.

The funding has been awarded to the 'Cancer Anti-invasive Programme' (CAP) private-public consortium as part of OSEO's Strategic Industrial Innovation scheme. The consortium (led by BioAlliance Pharma) comprises two innovative SMEs (Oroxcell and Xentech), two mid-sized companies (Novasep and CIT) - all of which will make project investments - and two academic centers of excellence (the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan and the Institut Gustave Roussy de Cancérologie). The consortium's total budget over five years is €9.9 million, including a number of grants-in-aid and repayable advances.

The collaborative programme will enable the development of two very innovative therapeutic products up to the commercialization phase: AMEPTM (a biotherapy indicated in invasive melanoma) and a first-in-class anticancer drug that targets invasive cancers and makes tumour cells revert to a normal phenotype. In parallel, the consortium will develop innovative animal models of invasive cancers with Xentech, highly predictive genotoxicity tests with Oroxcell and immunotoxicology tools with CIT. Novasep will develop an R&D-phase pilot facility for generating highly potent active ingredients (HPAIs). In collaboration with BioAlliance Pharma, the academic centers of excellence will identify new markers for monitoring tumour invasion.

Dominique Costantini, president and CEO of BioAlliance Pharma emphasized, "This is a significant amount of public funding and constitutes a major boost for the clinical development of two of our high-added-value projects. All the consortium partners have committed to infrastructure investments and the programme will provide highly innovative support for an industrial drug development pipeline."

OSEO's Strategic Industrial Innovation programme (known by its French acronym, ISI) promotes the emergence of European champions. It supports innovative, ambitious, industry-oriented, collaborative projects which are led by mid-sized companies (less than 5000 employees) or SMEs (less than 250 employees) and progress state-of-the-art technologies.