UA spinoff seeks safer cancer drugs

May 7, 2009

By hammersmith

[Source: Dan Sullivan, The Arizona Daily Star] – A University of Arizona spinoff company started by a husband-and-wife team is marketing a new technology aimed at making cancer drugs safer.
Luceome Biotechnologies is developing a product dubbed KinaseSeeker that is available to academic labs and drug companies to help speed cancer drug development.
The company was started by Reena Zutshi and her husband, Indraneel Ghosh.
Zutshi, former operations vice president at Tucson-based ImaRx Therapeutics, is the company’s president and CEO. Ghosh — an associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry and a member of the UA’s Bio5 biotechnology institute — is the chief scientific officer.
Luceome struck a deal with the UA’s Office of Technology Transfer to get exclusive rights to the UA-owned patent.
Launching a company like Luceome is good for Arizona, especially in such hard economic times, Ghosh said.
The biosciences industry directly contributed $12.5 billion to the state’s economy in 2007, according to a report by the Battelle Technology Partnership Practice.
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