The University of Arizona Center for Innovation and the town of Sahuarita are teaming up to launch a business incubator program after a successful pilot last year.
The new BizLaunch program, sponsored by Freeport McMoRan, will enroll five or six entrepreneurs or teams for its spring cohort, with six weeks of free training from April 8 through May 13 and a community demo day scheduled for May 20.
Interested entrepreneurs can learn more about the program at an informational and networking session at 5:30 p.m. March 25 at Pub 1922, 15920 S. Rancho Sahuarita Blvd. The BizLaunch training sessions will take place at Sahuarita Town Hall.
Six early-stage entrepreneurs went through an eight-session pilot training program last year, said Eric Smith, executive director of UACI.
This year, the BizLaunch program is focused on scalable startup companies — technology-enabled ventures with high potential for growth, as opposed to, say, a retail-store concept, Smith said.
UACI and the Sahuarita Economic Development Office are also teaming with the Small Business Development Center and its BizEDGE entrepreneurship program.
The Freeport Foundation awarded the town of Sahuarita a Community Investment Fund grant last year to fund its BizLaunch program through 2021.
Freeport, which operates the Sierrita Mine just west of Sahuarita, also provided partial funding for the town’s first tech park, the Sahuarita Advanced Manufacturing and Technology Center, which is under construction near the southeast corner of West Sahuarita Road and South La Cañada Drive.
For more information or to RSVP for the March 25 info session, and for links to an application, go to the event page on Eventbrite at tucne.ws/1ekv.
Drug startup gets $1.4M grant
Tucson-based drug startup EnduRx Pharmaceuticals has been awarded a $1.4 million Department of Defense grant to advance a new drug for breast cancer.
The 36-month project, with a total grant award of $1.75 million, is a collaboration with MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
The grant will further develop a new drug for triple-negative breast cancer — which tests negative for three common cellular receptors linked to cancers — to the point of meeting with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration ahead of filing a new drug application, the company said.
Dr. Stephan Morris, principal investigator on the grant for EnduRx, said that because triple-negative breast cancer lacks the receptors that enable the use of treatments used for other forms of breast cancer, only about 30% of patients at best respond to standard-of-care treatment.
“There are currently few approved drugs available specifically for the treatment of this fast growing and poor-outcome type of breast cancer,” said Morris, a molecular oncology specialist and former clinician and researcher at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
Untreated, the cancer is likely to metastasize to the brain and parts of the body, and the five-year survival rate is then only a little over 10%, so there is an urgent need for an effective therapy, he said.
EnduRx previously received a $1.75 million Small Business Innovation Research grant to develop a prototype of its drug delivery system.
EnduRx was launched in 2013 by Actus Biotechnologies, a technology development firm that had offices in Oro Valley and was highlighted in Tucson Tech in November 2013.
The company is now part of Obduro Biotechnologies, a San-Diego company formed in 2019.
David Loynd, who worked as a CPA for Actus and became president and CEO of EnduRx in 2015 as Actus withdrew, said EndurRx is a “virtual company” with key employees and consultants located in Memphis, Tennessee, Austin, Texas, Houston, Boston, Scottsdale, San Diego and elsewhere.
Loynd said that, as he now leads the company from Tucson, the company is positioned to put down deeper roots here. He said the company plans to use core research facilities at the University of Arizona and carry out pre-clinical activities in Scottsdale, and is open to working with large local biotechs like Roche Tissue Diagnostics, HTG Molecular and Icagen, as well as local startups.
Roche test wins FDA okay
Roche Tissue Diagnostics has won FDA approval for a test for women with the human papillomavirus infection who are at risk of cervical cancer.
The CINtec PLUS Cytology test identifies those women whose HPV infections are most likely to be associated with cervical pre-cancers, said Roche, which has its U.S. tissuediagnostics headquarters and major development and manufacturing operations in Oro Valley.
While most HPV infections heal on their own, some women who test positive for the virus or whose test results are inconclusive may develop pre-cancerous cervical lesions that, if left untreated, may progress to cervical cancer, Roche said.
The new test is expected to be widely commercially available in the U.S. later this year, Roche said.
