Ox­ford spin­out Arg­onaut looks to hack can­cer cells and pro­gram them to die

A new Ox­ford on­col­o­gy spin­out is join­ing the biotech ranks in the UK’s Gold­en Tri­an­gle.

The brain­child of Nick La Thangue, chair of can­cer bi­ol­o­gy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ox­ford, Arg­onaut Ther­a­peu­tics is look­ing to hack can­cer cells and trig­ger their de­struc­tion.

The biotech is cur­rent­ly work­ing on some pre­clin­i­cal can­di­dates that tar­get PRMT5, an en­zyme that con­trols a “switch” or tran­scrip­tion fac­tor that binds to DNA and ei­ther turns on a sig­nal for the cell to pro­lif­er­ate or push­es it in­to apop­to­sis, or cell death mode. And the up­start is fo­cused on col­orec­tal can­cer and lym­phoma, for starters, as it looks to ad­vance a po­ten­tial match for some of the im­munother­a­pies com­ing in­to use.

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