StarkAge Therapeutics announces research collaboration with Gustave Roussy to advance senolytic therapies in digestive cancers

CAR-T Digest - August 2020

27 January 2026: StarkAge Therapeutics announces research collaboration with Gustave Roussy to advance senolytic therapies in digestive cancers

StarkAge Therapeutics has entered a strategic research collaboration with Gustave Roussy, Europe’s leading cancer center, to advance the development of senolytic therapies in digestive cancers—marking an important step in the company’s oncology-focused pipeline
The collaboration will focus on characterizing treatment-induced cellular senescence in digestive tumors, analyzing how standard-of-care therapies drive senescent cell accumulation across a large patient dataset to better understand its impact on disease progression and outcomes
Insights from this research will directly inform the clinical development of STX-1, StarkAge’s first-in-class senolytic antibody-drug conjugate targeting DPP4 (CD26), a marker frequently expressed in primary tumors and overexpressed in metastatic disease, as the program advances toward IND-enabling studies
By combining StarkAge’s expertise in senescence biology with Gustave Roussy’s strengths in pathology and computational oncology, the collaboration aims to refine patient selection strategies and accelerate the translation of senescence-targeted therapies for patients with high unmet medical need
Together, the partners seek to open new therapeutic avenues in refractory digestive cancers, targeting both malignant and senescent cells to potentially overcome treatment resistance and improve patient survival through a novel senolytic ADC approach