125th St subway in Harlem

It’s all too easy to think of New Jersey as the behemoth of Pharmaland in the north east, while biology dominates in nearby Boston and Cambridge, yet Manhattan is rapidly turning out to be a nice home for quite a few young biotechs with a ready made source of talent and technology.

We’ve covered several of these companies over the last couple of years, including Volastra Therapeutics in Harlem.

What’s more, they’re working on a pipeline focused on chromosomal instability (CIN).

While many companies are getting into replication stress and synthetic lethality, CIN is a specific niche referring to genomic instability where chromosomes become unstable, such that either whole chromosomes or parts of chromosomes are duplicated or deleted (aneuploidy) such as point mutations or chromosome rearrangements.

Much of the genetic heterogeneity we see in tumours is largely due to chromosomal instability.

One of the up and coming areas in cancer research is CIN and the impacts of these changes and we may be able to address them with therapeutic interventions.

We’ve been following the progress of Volastra for a couple of years now so with their latest news centred around an in-licensing deal and closing on Series A financing, this is an excellent opportunity to provide an update and discuss what these developments mean in context…

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