Jack Stewart said he’s “happy but nervous” that his dream just got one step closer to reality.
Ten years after his inquisitive mind led to his research into the venomous saliva of a common backyard mammal, Stewart said he’s beyond excited about the remarkable, life-saving potential of what he has discovered.
“When we started this 10 years ago, we had no idea where it would lead. Where it’s gone in this time has been just outstanding,” said Stewart following a hefty funding announcement last week at Soricimed Biopharma, the private drug and diagnostic development company he helped found in 2005 to continue working on this promising research.
Stewart said he never could have imagined that his curiosity over the spit of a northern short-tailed shrew would have led to such remarkable possibilities for treating and diagnosing cancer.
In 2000, along with the help of his biochemistry students at Mount Allison University and several pounds of pepperoni, Stewart began luring the shrews to his backyard because he wanted to know more about the paralytic venom the animals were excreting.
This interest soon led to the exciting discovery of a very small but important compound derived from the shrew’s venomous saliva – a peptide Stewart’s team refers to as ‘soricidin,’ which began to show great promise for diagnosis and treatment of cancer.
Stewart and his team at Soricimed have since successfully synthesized the protein and are continuing to further explore the promise of soricidin as both a highly-potent cancer detection compound and a treatment drug. Tests and experiments will focus on ovarian, prostate and breast cancers.
“This is a huge breakthrough. I don’t think we even realize how big this is,” said Stewart, who serves as chief scientific officer at Soricimed.
Paul Gunn, Soricimed Biopharma’s president and CEO, said this protein not only has the potential to diagnose cancer at an earlier stage but also to treat the disease without the jarring effects of chemotherapy and radiation.
“The work Soricimed is doing today will end up saving many lives in the future through the early detection and more efficient treatment of cancer," he said.
Gunn explained that their research has so far shown that soricidin targets only the cancer cells in the body, not the healthy cells, so has very little toxicity.
“It’s shown to be as effective as chemo but without the side effects. So it won’t be hit and miss like a lot of treatments are,” he said.
Soricimed Biopharma Inc. was awarded $568,688 from the National Research Council of Canada Industrial Research Assistance Program (NRC-IRAP) last week.
Gunn said government funding and support has provided Soricimed with the boost it has needed to raise more than $5.3 million as the team continues their research, which is so far advanced that human clinical trials are expected to get under way within the next year.
"With the assistance of NRC-IRAP, we are working to move our cancer treatment from the laboratory into clinical trials and eventually into hospitals."
Gary Goodyear, minister of state for science and technology, was on hand for the federal funding announcement and said he was impressed with the promising research being done at Soricimed.
“This has life-saving potential . . . this is research that could one day save the lives of cancer patients and that is why it is such a thrill to be a partner in this,” he said.
During the event, Goodyear also presented a Canadian Innovation Leader Certificate to Soricimed to highlight its success as an innovative Canadian firm that has successfully linked scientific research to commercialization, jobs and economic growth.
Stewart says his team will now put its focus towards developing an ovarian cancer therapeutic and a companion early diagnostic.
“Right now, there is no early diagnostic for ovarian cancer,” he says. “So this will allow us, through a simple blood test, to go in and see the cancer at stage one instead of stage three or four.”
