Neoantigen, a pharmaceutical technology company, recently founded its headquarters in Luohu, bringing new vitality to the district’s big-health sector.
Neoantigen is a high-tech enterprise focusing on precision tumor diagnosis and treatment. It proposed the utility of organoids to achieve precision tumor treatment.
Organoids are an in-vitro model based on human cell generation and fully preserves patient-specific distinctions. Jia Zhenghu, president of Neoantigen, and his team built a more bionic, controllable, and standardized organoid chip in two years.
That can help reduce the culture cycle of organs in tumors by half and increase the consistency of the cell culture environment from 70% to more than 90%, which can help achieve a more accurate simulation of cancerous growth and better devise an individualized treatment plan.
“In fact, each drug has a clinical response efficiency of only 10-20%,” Shan Changliang, chief scientist of Neoantigen and professor in pharmacy at Nankai University, said. “We use organoids to screen drugs, which can make up for the lack of clinical response. From culture to screening, the whole lab system is already very mature.”
On the basis of accurate diagnosis, Neoantigen also develops personalized tumor vaccine TIL through scientific prediction of tumor neoantigens. By stimulating the immune system in tumor patients, the vaccine activates the immune system to kill cancer cells and does not act on normal cells, avoiding the systemic and toxic side effects of traditional tumor therapy.
Now the company has completed the preliminary construction of tissue sample banks for a variety of solid tumor populations and built a domestic first-class PDX model and organoid transformation platform.
Luohu sees Neoantigen’s starting operations in Luohu as a vote of confidence for the district’s business environment.
“Luohu is a pioneering urban area in Shenzhen and has policy advantages in cell and gene therapy,” Jia said.
“Under the layout of Shenzhen Luohu Hospital Group, there are a number of medical branches that can cooperate with our clinical trials and medical device projects,” he added.
Jia also mentioned Luohu’s location in the center of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, saying that its geographical and cultural closeness to Hong Kong can help the company better integrate relative resources.
As a life and health industry base in Shenzhen, Luohu has always paid attention to the development of life and health industry clusters and has continuously promoted breakthroughs in precision medicine, high-end health care, innovative drugs, and high-end medical apparatus. To this end, the district authorities have implemented a series of supportive policies.
By the end of last year, there were 65 big-health enterprises above designated size and 30 innovation platforms in the district.