An anti-leukemia compound identified at NCI at Frederick is one step closer to entering clinical trials in humans thanks to a $4.2-million grant from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT). CPRIT recently gave the funds to Allterum Therapeutics, Inc., a Texas-based biotechnology startup company created to manufacture the compound, Allterum, and advance it to human trials. The grant represents the first step in the multi-million-dollar process to bring Allterum to the clinic.

Serguei Kozlov, Ph.D., doesn’t recall if it was he who first contacted clinician Udo Rudloff, M.D., Ph.D., or Rudloff who contacted him. He just knows that their resulting two-year collaboration, which recently moved a first-in-class drug for metastatic cancer toward clinical trials, is one of the best he’s ever had.

Ira Pastan, Ph.D., says the FDA’s recent approval of moxetumomab pasudotox, a drug that originated in his lab, wasn’t like “hitting a home run with the bases loaded, all of it happening in 20 seconds.” In fact, it was more like 20 years.

Attendees packed the Building 549 Conference Center for the National Interagency Confederation for Biological Research (NICBR) Winter Symposium, the latest in a series that aims to foster collaboration between its eight member agencies. Each symposium focuses on a specific theme, with the most recent event organized around novel therapeutics.

When NCI at Frederick began receiving royalty money from the HPV vaccine research by Doug Lowy, John Schiller, and colleagues, a portion was set aside for facilities renovations on the NCI at Frederick campus. One of the first spaces slated for renovation was Building 538, which was mainly occupied by Center for Cancer Research (CCR) scientists.