RS Research was founded in 2015 by Prof Rana Sanyal and Dr Sena Nomak with the aim to treat cancer using ‘smart chemotherapy’. After completing her PhD at Boston University Rana Sanyal worked at Amgen, California, for 3.5 years and in 2004 moved back to Turkey to conduct research at Bogazici University in Istanbul. In 2015 she teamed up with Sena Nomak, who has a business development and project management background from the Marine, Energy and Defence industries, to start RS Research. In the past three years the company has conducted R&D and managed to get Turkey’s first clinical trial approval for a novel chemotherapy agent, RS-0139. The company is interested to meet peers, collaborators and investors alike to leverage its technologies for the benefit of cancer patients worldwide.
RS Research aims to treat cancer with an innovative plug & play drug-delivery platform using already marketed proven chemical agents; thus lowering development risk. It exploits the fact that chemotherapy is effective but reduces the required dose and thus the side effects, ultimately promising to improve quality of life for cancer patients. This combination of both tumour targeting and chemotherapy is possible through their development of two innovative drug delivery platforms that can carry drug conjugates as well as a targeting moiety for directing the assembly to tumour tissue - so called ‘smart chemotherapy’. With a full FTO conducted, RS Research has patented its nanocarrier-linker-drug combinations and added targeting moieties and has in its pipeline five drug candidates at different stages of preclinical development. Data shows superior results such as improved side effect profiles and increases in efficacy with increased dose. Their first drug candidate RS-0139 has been approved by the Turkish Ministry of Health to start a phase-1 clinical trial.
