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Mestastop Solutions, a Bengaluru-based biotech company focused on stopping the spread of cancer, has been awarded Rs 2.66 crore grant by the Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC) under the focused call of "establishment of preclinical models for drug discovery".
Mestastop will use the funds to develop both in vitro and in vivo models for metastasis-focused drug discovery, focusing on triple-negative breast and oral cancer. The grant in aid will complement Mestastop's contribution of 1.21 Cr.
This grant comes at an exciting time for Mestastop, which plans to start its first Ph 2A clinical trial in India next year and is also working on MoUs with European hospitals. The biotech startup is progressing with drug discovery programmes, with its first hit series against a novel-first-in-class target showing a 100% efficacy against metastasis in high-throughput in vivo models.
Dr Arnab Roy Chowdhury, the Founder and Director of Mestastop, said, "We have established groundbreaking technology for using actual colorectal cancer patient data to identify high-risk patients for personalised metastasis treatment and therefore offer a paradigm shift in cancer treatment, with a first-in-a-lifetime chance to cure the disease. We thank BIRAC for recognising the potential of this technology and funding us to enable this technology for both oral and triple-negative breast cancers, the two most common cancers in the Indian population".
