How a U of A spinoff company beat the odds to create a new kind of cancer treatment

Twelve years of teamwork brings Pacylex to the brink of Phase 2 human clinical trials — a rare feat in new drug development.

A University of Alberta spinoff company is looking to raise millions of dollars from investors in a bid to further test its promising anti-cancer drug through Phase 2 human trials. 

Pacylex Pharmaceuticals was formed in 2012 by three U of A staff members. The company was recently named 2024 Company of the Year by BioAlberta. The intervening 12 years tell a story of teamwork and community support that have moved a treatment first envisioned in a U of A lab steadily toward becoming a commercially available drug to help cancer patients around the world. 

“We want to let people — donors, investors and other investigators — know that it is possible to do translational research in Alberta, that you can go from the idea, the results in the lab, and translate that into a medicine that can be used by patients,” says company co-founder Luc Berthiaume, professor in the Department of Cell Biology, member of the Cancer Research Institute of Northern Alberta and chief scientific officer of Pacylex.

Pacylex is the first in the world to develop a new class of drugs — N-myristoyltransferase inhibitors — that preferentially kill cancer cells. 

The company’s lead drug candidate, zelenirstat, delivered orally as a once-a-day pill, has completed Phase 1 trials in Canada, and has been shown to be sufficiently safe to continue clinical development with evidence of potential efficacy against blood and solid tumour cancers. 

The odds are against any new drug getting to this stage, according to co-founder John Mackey, professor emeritus of oncology, founder of the Alberta Pre-Phase 1 Cancer Program and chief medical officer of Pacylex.

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