The head of the Jordanovac hospital, Miroslav Samardzija said this is the fourth generation drug of the so-called targeted therapy which is targeting specific gene mutations at certain types of lung cancer.
After the adoption of legal regulations necessary for clinical testing in Croatia, Samardzija expects the application of the medicine to begin in 2018.
The scientist who developed the drug, Stagljar, lives and works in Canada. He told Croatian Television that he and his team have been working on the new lung cancer drug for the past five years.
The development of this type of drug cost between 600 million and one billion dollars.
Igor Stagljar was born in Zagreb, Croatia, where he received his M.Sc. in Molecular Biology from the University of Zagreb in 1990. He then moved to Switzerland where he received his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology and Microbiology, from the Swiss Federal School of Technology (ETH) in Zurich in 1994.
Afterwards he undertook two post-doctoral positions both at the University of Zurich, first working on RNA polymerase II transcription in mammals, and second on various aspects of DNA replication and repair in yeast.
From 1999 to 2002, Igor was a Junior Group Leader and from 2002 to 2005 Assistant Professor at the University of Zurich. In 2001, he was a Visiting Scientist at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA, where he worked in the lab of Dr. Stanley Fields, the inventor of the yeast two-hybrid technology.
Since the summer of 2005, Stagljar has been an Associate Professor at the Department of Biochemistry and the Department of Medical Genetics and Microbiology , University of Toronto. His labs are located in the Terrence Donnelly Center for Cellular and Biomolecular Research (CCBR), a new and cutting-edge, interdisciplinary research centre in the heart of Toronto's research district.
Stagljar is now a full time professor at the Medical School of the University of Toronto and the head of the The Quality of Life Research Unit at the University of Toronto.