Australia-based Cancer Therapeutics CRC Pty Ltd (CTx) announced a collaboration with Duke University, North Carolina, USA (Duke) to discover and develop new drugs for the treatment of many forms of cancer, based on research undertaken by the laboratory of Duke professor Patrick Casey.

Professor Casey and his team at Duke have been investigating lipid signalling pathways and the role of lipid metabolising enzymes in cancer for many years and have developed a series of promising new inhibitors of these enzymes. CTx has taken an exclusive license to these inhibitors and will initiate a drug development programme to bring these early stage compounds toward the clinic. This adds to CTx's international collaborations and was greatly facilitated by CTx's commercial partner, Cancer Research Technology Ltd of the UK and its US subsidiary, Cancer Research Technology Inc.

CTx's CEO, Tony Evans commented that collaborating with an academic medical centre of Duke's calibre is a major expansion of CTx's capabilities in partnering with overseas cancer researchers in order to source the most promising novel targets for CTx's drug discovery projects.