Lead candidates are licensed through a partnership with the University of Louisville cancer center.

Advanced Cancer Therapeutics (ACT) raised $10 million through a financing round with Kentucky-based investors. The firm says the funds will help it push on with development of its preclinical pipeline of cancer treatments and vaccines. The investment round was closed six months ahead of the original year-end goal.

ACT has an option to exclusively license cancer therapeutic candidates developed at the University of Louisville’s James Graham Brown Cancer Center. The firm’s current preclinical pipeline derived through this partnership includes four anticancer therapeutics and a tobacco plant-derived vaccine against human papillomavirus (HPV). Of these, ACT’s lead projects include small molecule inhibitors of PKFKFB3 and choline kinase and a DNA quadruplex, designated PU27, which is designed to inhibit cancer cell proliferation. John Trent, Ph.D., associate professor at the Brown Center’s department of medicine, has been contracted to work alongside ACT to progress the PKFKFB3 and choline kinase programs.

The latest $10 million round of fundraising follows on from ACT’s receipt in February of the final $250,000 tranche of a $500,000 investment by the Kentucky Economic Development Partnership Board’s Commonwealth Seed Capital.

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