Erytech Pharma, a late-stage French biopharmaceutical company developing medicinal products for oncology, has received a total of € 6.95 million in support from the Strategic Industrial Innovation programme of the French public organization OSEO to lead the TEDAC project (Therapeutic Enzymes to Deplete Amino acids to treat Cancers resistant to radio/chemotherapy).

The consortium also includes Exonhit, InGen BioSciences, AP-HP (Paris Public Hospitals), Inserm (National Institute for medical research), and Paris-Diderot University. It aims at developing innovative therapies for the enzymatic treatment of chemo- or radio-resistant cancers, and accompanying tools to identify responders and enable personalized care of patients. The project, endorsed by the Competitiveness Cluster Lyonbiopôle, will run over 8 years. The total amount of support awarded to the consortium amounts to approximately €10.7 million.

Erytech is developing a new approach to fight cancer by starving tumours through depleting specific amino acids, needed for the tumour growth, from their metabolic environment. Weakening tumours by acting on their environment is synergic with classical chemotherapy drugs

Major goals of this project are: To develop a relevant ex vivo human tumour model in order to be as close as possible to the clinical conditions; To offer to clinicians an adjusted therapy according to patients’ tumor characteristics; To identify biomarkers of susceptibility to therapeutic response in the context of reducing the risks associated with the development of treatments;  To develop an enzymatic therapy companion diagnostic that will identify responders, thus improving personalized care;  To propose a new monitoring test that enables the simple, rapid, and reliable measure to check therapeutic enzymes action in real time during the treatment.

Pierre-Olivier Goineau, CEO of Erytech, stated: “We are delighted by OSEO’s confidence in our project dedicated to optimize cancer treatment and by the quality and commitment of the partners that have joined us. This project is a key step in the implementation of our strategy in personalized medicine. We will offer a new way of fighting cancers by better profiling the patients and offering up to four complementary products to fight cancer by well-targeted and prolonged depletion of specific amino acids from the tumour environment.”

The "Strategic Industrial Innovation" (ISI) programme promotes the emergence of European champions. It supports ambitious collaborative industry-oriented innovations, implemented by academic institutions together with medium-sized companies (less than 5,000 employees) and SMEs (less than 250). If successful, these projects are very promising: they aim at commercializing products and technological breakthroughs that could not be achieved without public funding. The financial aid ranges from € 3 to 10 million in the form of grants and redeemable advances.