The funding grant was announced at the National Foundation for Medical Research and Innovation Awards. Credit: UniQuest.

A research team at Australia’s University of Queensland (UQ) has secured a A$344,000 grant from the National Foundation for Medical Research and Innovation to advance a topical cream to prevent and treat skin cancers in organ transplant recipients through pre-clinical development.

The new drug in the cream was developed in collaboration with the university’s commercialisation company UniQuest’s Queensland Emory Drug Discovery Initiative (QEDDI).

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UQ’s Frazer Institute Associate Professor Dr James Wells stated that the cream’s drug prevents skin cancer formation and added: “This project funding is essential to progress the cream through pre-clinical development and allow us to create a formula suitable for application on human skin. It’s a major step forward that we hope will allow us to take this promising molecule to clinical trials down the track.

“Currently there are no FDA [US Food and Drugs Administration]-approved drugs to treat SCCs [squamous cell carcinoma] in these patients, so skin cancers must be managed with regular medical checks and removals over a person’s lifetime until one becomes too advanced and metastasises.

“Patients are left with few options without risking transplant rejection, and that’s why this new treatment would be life-changing for them.”

The pre-clinical development work is expected to enable manufacturing on a larger scale.

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A patent has been filed by UniQuest for the molecule.

A small molecule drug discovery initiative, QEDDI focuses on creating new medicines from academic biomedical research.

With a focus on addressing unmet medical needs, its pipeline includes potential treatments for conditions including cancer, neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, and inflammatory disorders.