skip to main content

Our Science

 

Killing Cancer Cells is Easy

Killing Only the Cancer Cells is the Critical Challenge for Improving Patient Outcomes and Safety

Anyone who has worked with tumor samples in a laboratory knows that killing cancer cells is not terribly complicated. There are all manner of agents that will kill almost any type of tumor cell.

The reason more progress has not been made in improving patient outcomes is because there are very few ways to kill cancer cells, safely. It is extremely challenging to administer anti-cancer drugs – which are great at killing cells – at doses that effectively kill only the cancer and not harm the patient.

At Nouveau, we have unlocked the ability of established, validated chemistry to kill cancer cells in a way that is safe and tolerable for patients. The ability to transform how we discover and create these new drug entities is THE most significant near-term opportunity in the oncology sector.

We believe the Nouveau platform is one that is:

  1. Broadly applicable across all of cancer medicine;
  2. Is remarkably capital efficient, and
  3. Is achievable in the near-term and on a large scale.
Nanopolymer Chemistry Converts Combinatorial Therapeutics into Unlimited Opportunity for New IP

Our nano-polymer technology allows us to create optimized combinatorial therapeutics and convert them into unlimited opportunities for new intellectual property.

We have the ability to enhance these assets with homing motifs to further enhance their precision, safety and efficacy.

We identify only the most scientifically promising disease directed combinatorial assets using informed functional chemical screens, coupled to the characterization of unique biological mechanism of action through functional genomics and computational biology.

Our Technology

Micelle Core Shell Image

The polymer nanoparticle (PNP) platform can accommodate most drugs, alone or in combination, creating highly tailored precision targeted drug entities.

30-fold greater drug exposure

Polymer nanoparticle of drug (in red) produces a 30-fold higher exposure of drug to the tumor compared to the raw drug matter.

Ghost Nanoparticle

Despite a 30-fold greater exposure of the drug, there is no proportional increase in toxicity, represented by the upward deflections on the bar graph. Blue represents the least toxic ghost PNP, red the raw drug matter (with highest toxicity score) and the PNP NBS-001 (shown in green) with less toxicity that the raw drug matter.

Survival Advantage in Animals

The improved safety in the PNP is a result of better tumor targeting, and produces a statistically significant improvement in overall survival (PNP shown in purple) in a murine xenograft of aggressive T-cell lymphoma.

Orthotopic Model of Pancreas Cancer

Highly engineered polymer nanoparticles (PNP) are designed to selectively bioaccumulate in the tumor microenvironment, reducing off-target toxicity and improving efficacy.