Today, that promise came a step closer to being fulfilled when the Otago researcher’s start-up company received a multimillion-dollar boost to her research work investigating cancer treatment drugs.
Dr Diermeier, a biochemist, and her team at the University of Otago research RNA and whether it can be targeted by drugs intended to stem or stop the progression of cancer through the body.
A biotech start-up, Amaroq, has been set up through Otago Innovation to commercialise its work, and the firm has just secured a $14million investment.
The investment, made by Brandon Capital, New Zealand Innovation Booster and Cure Kids Ventures, is the largest obtained by Otago Innovation, which was set up to commercialise the work of university researchers.
‘‘Getting from my lab to a patient is a huge step and there aren’t many people around who could fund this because clinical trials are very expensive,’’ Dr Diermeier said.
‘‘The company takes over that step of getting from the lab to the patient ... and now we have this amazing amount of money we can take our research and run with it and take it as far as we can.’’
Brandon Capital, a transtasman medical start-up investment firm, administers a Callaghan Innovation Repayable Grant scheme.
Its New Zealand head, Duncan Mackintosh, said the size of the sum invested in Amaroq reflected how world-leading Dr Diermeier’s work had the potential to be.
“Knowing that there are very few companies exploring RNA for oncology purposes makes this an exciting opportunity and the fact that it could prove helpful in the fight against cancer, a disease area affecting so many, is compelling.”
Unlike chemotherapy drugs, which affect all cells in the body, the therapy Dr Diermeier is researching is targeted at solely the RNA which contains cancer cells.
As well as attaining United States Food and Drug Administration approval for her work, she hoped to soon be able to move on to conduct live trials of the experimental therapy, which might take place in New Zealand, Dr Diermeier said.
She received a Rutherford Discovery Fellowship for her research in this area in 2018.
‘‘The fellowship was instrumental to getting to this point because the way it works is it allows me to predominantly do research and very little teaching, which I would normally do as an academic at a university.’’
She and her team were focused on treating common cancers such as breast, colorectal and liver cancers, building on genome-sequencing work done by previous researchers.
‘‘There isn’t a limit to where we can go with this, so hopefully we could rerun this sequence on other cancers.
‘‘If it works on these ones, there is no reason to believe that it won’t work for others.’’
