DETROIT — Qurgen may not yet be a household name, but its research could one day revolutionize treatments for cancer, heart failure and diabetes.

The company was founded in 2012 by Wayne State University School of Medicine faculty members Jianjun Wang, Ph.D., professor of biochemistry, microbiology and immunology, and QianQian Li, M.D., associate professor of biochemistry, microbiology and immunology, as well as two senior staff investigators from Henry Ford Health System, Feng Jiang, Ph.D., and Michael Chopp, Ph.D.

The name “Qurgen” is a nod to the “QQ-reagent,” a polymer-based protein delivery vehicle invented by Wang and Li. The company is focused on pioneering breakthrough transcription factor drugs that reprogram damaged, diseased or degenerated tissue cells in vivo into different types of stem cells that quickly differentiate into younger healthy tissue cells for major human disease treatment.

“I trained and worked in structural biology for 20 years,” said Wang. “In collaboration with Professor Li, we developed a method of delivering proteins into the target cellular organelles with greater than 96% protein delivery efficiency. If it's a nuclear protein, for instance, it can directly go into the nucleus without scrambling the other organelles. That's a breakthrough technique because intracellular organelle targeting and high-delivery efficiency is extremely critical for protein delivery used in disease therapies or disease diagnosis.”

Wang soon began wondering about the possibility of using this technique to transform diseased or damaged cells into new stem cells for regenerative medicine purposes.

“The road to Qurgen’s innovations began when a colleague approached me about a recent publication,” said Wang. “It showed that adding a few transcription factor proteins into mice skin cells could result, after a few months, in those skin cells becoming cells similar to embryonic stem cells known as induced pluripotent stem cells. However, the protein delivery method used in the publication was inefficient with no nuclear targeting capability. Although it wasn’t the area of expertise for Dr. Li and me, we sought to use our protein delivery technique to improve what was found in this publication.”

Grant funding was secured to study the possibilities of their research, and the question was soon raised about commercializing these technology platforms.

“Qurgen’s first breakthrough innovation was pioneering a class of proteins called a transcription factor,” said Wang. “Transcription factors form a large protein family that has the capability of simultaneously interacting with hundreds or thousands of genes inside the nuclei to modulate the molecular pathways controlled by these genes. Traditional targeted cancer therapy only regulates one single molecular pathway. Previously, transcription factors were considered undruggable due to the lack of a protein delivery technique that targets a transcription factor in cell nuclei. The QQ-protein delivery technology is how Qurgen can deliver transcription factors into the nucleus with greater than 96% efficiency.”

Qurgen has since developed several world-first transcription factor drugs to treat cancer, heart disease, diabetes, eye disease and one focused on anti/reversing-aging.

“Qurgen’s second breakthrough innovation was its patented invention of a safe and efficient transcription factor-induced in vivo disease tissue reprogramming technology platform,” said Wang. “Instead of reprogramming cells in vitro in a petri dish using the iPSC technique, this platform directly reprograms diseased cells inside the diseased tissues of a patient, turning that tissue’s cells into different types of stem cells for tissue repair, regeneration, disease treatment and reverse aging.”

Wang said using these new platforms has led Qurgen to develop what he believes is a “paradigm-shifting cancer therapy.” This cancer therapy directly converts malignant cancer cells into normal tissue cells through pluripotency-based cancer tissue reprogramming in vivo by systemic injections of a transcription factor drug. Pre-clinical studies indicate that this new cancer therapy could radically improve cancer treatment since it not only provides a new anti-cancer strategy but also would remove the negative factors of current cell-killing-based cancer therapies such as drug resistance, toxicity and cancer recurrence.

“This would be an entirely new way to treat cancer,” said Wang. “Most cancer treatments use chemotherapy, radiation therapy, targeted therapy and/or immunotherapy, which are mostly focused on killing the bad cells. Our cell-converting cancer therapies are focused on turning the bad cells into good cells.”

Approved by the FDA for an IND application of a world-first transcription factor anti-cancer drug, Qurgen has been conducting Phase I clinical trials in five hospitals throughout the United States since September 2023. Current clinical data demonstrates the safety and initial high efficacy of this transcription factor drug. This would open the door to final FDA approval of a new transcription factor-based cancer therapy that could potentially lead to a strategic partnership within the pharmaceutical industry and a potential initial public offering for Qurgen.

Since formation, more than $55 million dollars in total funding has been raised to support Qurgen’s pre-clinical and clinical trials. The company has also sponsored ongoing research at Wayne State University since 2017.  Approximately $2.55 million in total sponsored research to Wayne State was secured through two industry-sponsored research grants, titled “Stem Cell Therapy for Triple Negative Breast Cancer” and “Development of QQ-Crispr-CAS9 technology for efficient genome editing in vitro and in vivo.”

“Qurgen is doing things that are breakthroughs in the drug development field,” said Wang. “We’re combining different novel ideas in a way that people haven’t done before.”

“According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, cancer is the second-leading cause of death in the United States,” said Taunya Phillips, assistant vice president for technology commercialization at Wayne State University. “Dr. Wang’s and Dr. Li’s research advances may one day soon offer an alternative treatment for cancer patients in the United States and around the world. We are excited to continue to work with Qurgen as they pursue their groundbreaking research and clinical trials.”

For more information about Qurgen, visit www.qurgen.com.

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Wayne State University is one of the nation’s pre-eminent public research universities in an urban setting. Through its multidisciplinary approach to research and education, and its ongoing collaboration with government, industry and other institutions, the university seeks to enhance economic growth and improve the quality of life in the city of Detroit, state of Michigan and throughout the world. For more information about research at Wayne State University, visit research.wayne.edu.

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