To stimulate collaboration between companies in the Oslo Cancer Cluster, the cluster have through Innovation Norway´s funding scheme “Innovasjonsrammen” granted five member companies project funding between NOK 500 000 – 100 000.
PCI Biotech, Ultimovacs, Arctic Pharma, Oncoimmunity and MyHere are the lucky companies, and they will all use the funding to develop improved cancer treatments.
“Oslo Cancer Cluster encourages collaboration between companies. We highly appreciate that Innovation Norway has a funding scheme like *Innovasjonsrammen* that enables us to fund projects that may drive collaboration and innovation to develop innovativ cancer treatments,” said Ketil Widerberg, CEO of Oslo Cancer Cluster.
The projects granted funding are:
Joint project PCI Biotech and Ultimovacs
PCI Biotech, a cancer focused biopharmaceutical company, and it’s partner Ultimovacs, a pharmaceutical company developing novel immunotherapy against cancer, received funding of NOK 500.000,- for further development of the existing preclinical research collaboration. The purpose of the collaboration is to utilise the companies’ complementary scientific platforms to explore potential synergies and the grant will support these activities.
Arctic Pharma and Oslo University
Arctic Pharma’s main objective is to develop therapies for breast cancer (triple-negative subtypes) that to date have non-specific treatments and the poorest survival outcome. Arctic Pharma will create therapies that kill cancer cells by attacking the core of their metabolism, and was granted NOK 100.000,- in their effort together with University og Oslo, to test and characterize their most promising therapies, which they are in the process of patenting.
OncoImmunity and partners
OncoImmunity provides innovative software solutions to guide the discovery of neoantigen-based personalized immunotherapies and biomarkers. One of the major challenges to overcome is the accurate identification of immunogenic peptides in the tumor, and their precise constellation on a personalized vaccine. In this project OncoImmunity and partners were granted NOK 300.000,- to develop a software framework to predict the peptides that confer maximum immunogenicity with minimum autoimmune side-affects to a patient.
Myehere and partners
Myhere and partners were granted NOK 100.000,- for a pilot study.
