SAN DIEGO—Crown Bioscience, a global drug discovery and development services company providing translational platforms to advance oncology, inflammation, cardiovascular and metabolic disease research, has reached an agreement with the University of Utah to license and commercialize the university’s unique collection of patient-derived xenograft (PDX) models for breast cancer.

 

The models include multiple triple-negative breast cancer models, models that display therapy resistance and models that express clinically relevant mutations such as BRCA1 and ESR1.

 

Crown says that these “well-published” breast cancer models were developed by Dr. Alana Welm, a cancer researcher at Huntsman Cancer Institute and an associate professor in the Department of Oncological Sciences at the University of Utah whose research focuses on breast cancer metastasis and how it is influenced by tumor-host interactions.

 

CrownBio maintains that it provides the world’s largest commercially available collection of PDX models and is a leading service provider for preclinical evaluation of cancer therapies. Leveraging these capabilities, CrownBio says it will market a set of new, highly characterized breast cancer models alongside their industry-leading collection of more than 2500 PDX models (HuPrime).

 

“CrownBio provides the biopharmaceutical community with preclinical solutions that enable the exploration of new treatment strategies and improved translation to the clinic,” said Dr. Jean-Pierre Wery, CrownBio’s CEO. “By licensing and commercializing Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah’s breast cancer models, these valuable, translational models are made available to breast cancer researchers worldwide.”