Apogee Biotechnology Corporation was founded in 2001 by Charles D. Smith, Ph.D. and is based at the Hershey Center for Applied Research in Hershey, Pennsylvania.
Apogee is developing orally available, small molecules for the treatment of cancer and inflammatory diseases.
The Company is privately held and has been financed through mainly grants, including small business innovative research (SBIR) grants from the NIH and biotechnology grants from the Pennsylvania Department of Health.
We are dedicated to developing our sphingosine kinase inhibitor program for the treatment of solid tumors and a variety of chronic inflammatory diseases as well as in indications of damaging acute inflammation.
Our product pipeline includes small molecule inhibitors of sphingosine kinase with a clinical lead compound, ABC294640 (opaganib). Sphingosine kinase generates sphingosine-1-phosphate which drives many cancer types and inflammatory diseases and disorders. Our main disease focus is using our technologies to treat solid tumor cancers that have been validated in preclinical animal tumor models including renal cell carcinoma, breast, brain, pancreatic, myeloma and colon cancers. This therapy has also shown excellent efficacy in animal models of inflammatory damage/inflammation including arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, lupus, liver transplantation and kidney ishcemia and reperfusion injury (during cardiac bypass surgery, for example). Recently, ABC294640 has shown clinical efficacy in COVID-19 patients, working through mechanisms of inhibiting viral entry and replication as well as reducing inflammatory damage in the lungs.
Due to its far reaching mechanisms of action, ABC294640 has shown additive or synergistic effects with many current standard of care drugs in animal models of inflammatory disease and cancer and thus shows promise as an attractive add-on therapy to many of these drugs in future clinical trials.