OncoNano Granted $9.97 Million from Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas

ONM-100 is OncoNano’s lead product candidate that uses the pH-sensitive micelle platform to encapsulate a fluorescent tag and exploit a universal biomarker of all solid cancers.

FREMONT, CA: OncoNano Medicine was awarded $9.97 million from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) to expand the application of its lead product, ONM-100. This product is an innovative imaging agent used in intraoperative surgical resection of solid tumors for imaging metastatic disease.

ONM-100 was granted a Fast Track designation from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and is currently in Phase 2 clinical trials. During these trials, researchers discovered that ONM-100 could also be used to image and stage metastatic disease, which represents 45-50 percent of all cancer diagnoses and is responsible for 90 percent of patient deaths. Improvement in the visualization of metastatic disease, both preoperatively and during surgery, is critical for initial diagnosis, accurate staging, therapeutic choice, and efficacy, and is closely tied to patient survival.

The grant from CPRIT will enable the company to expand the application of ONM-100 to the identification of metastatic disease in the peritoneum, lymph nodes, and pleural surfaces – areas that comprise 40 percent of metastatic disease and result from primary tumors originating from numerous cancer types.

“With limited tools available today that allow doctors to visualize tumors that have metastasized, especially small and disperse ones often characteristic of metastatic disease, the funding we received from CPRIT for our pH-sensitive micelle approach for imaging metastatic disease has the potential to solve a tremendous unmet need,” said Ravi Srinivasan, Ph.D., CEO of OncoNano Medicine. “CPRIT has been our partner since our founding and we greatly appreciate their ongoing support as we bring our technologies through development to benefit patients.”

In addition to the grants received for ONM-100, OncoNano was awarded $15.4 million from CPRIT in August 2019 to advance ONM-500, leveraging its proprietary pH-sensitive micelle technology to deliver antigens while activating innate immunity for the treatment of cancers caused by the human papillomavirus (HPV).

“CPRIT continues to be impressed with OncoNano Medicine’s outcomes using their unique micelle technology to detect metastatic cancer,” said Cindy Walker Peach, Ph.D., Chief Product Development Officer at CPRIT. “We’re looking forward to successful clinical trials that clearly demonstrate favorable impact to cancer patient care.”