CiQUS researchers lead a project to develop a novel anticancer agent awarded with the EIC Transition

The EIC Transition call selects, in its last edition, a project of CiQUS, a center attached to the USC and belonging to the CIGUS Network – an initiative promoted by the Xunta de Galicia that brings together the centers of the system that have accredited their scientific excellence.

The project benefiting from this call of the European Innovation Council, MEDiCS, is led by the Oportunius researcher José Luis Mascareñas and aims at the clinical development of a new anticancer agent.

MEDiCS, acronym for Anticancer approach based on the Metabolic Disruption of Cancer Stem Cells, is a project that focuses on the preclinical potential demonstrated by a family of ruthenium-based metal complexes to combat certain tumors.

At this point in the research, the objective of the team led by Mascareñas is to advance the maturity of the technology by completing the preclinical phase necessary before starting human clinical trials. The project will seek to improve the behaviour of this novel compound in the pre-clinical stage against two particularly challenging types of cancer: pancreatic cancer, due to its high prevalence, and colon cancer, due to its high mortality, both with a huge impact on society. To carry out its research, the leading consortium from CiQUS will receive €2.5 million over the next three years.

The teams working on this research will already be supported by other programs such as Ignicia – a transfer initiative of the Xunta de Galicia that promotes the development of commercial applications of research generated in Galicia.

This project is the second EIC Transition that achieves the Singular Research Center in Biological Chemistry and Molecular Materials (CiQUS), and convert the University of Santiago de Compostela together with the Universitat Pompeu Fabra as the only Spanish universities, who got the double in this program.

The EIC Transition programme is designed to bridge the gap between early stage research and market-ready innovations, with the aim of maturing promising technologies to demonstrate their feasibility in real-world applications and route them towards commercialization.