On January 18, 2022 Lantern Pharma (NASDAQ: LTRN), a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company using its proprietary RADR artificial intelligence ("A.I.") platform to transform the cost, pace, and timeline of oncology drug discovery and development, reported a collaboration and research agreement with The Danish Cancer Society Research Center (DCRC) to support clinical development of Lantern’s acylfulvene class drug candidates, LP-100 and LP-184, as well as the development of improved diagnostic methods to identify nucleotide excision repair (NER) deficient tumors (Press release, Lantern Pharma, JAN 18, 2022, View Source [SID1234605540]). LP-100 and LP-184 have both shown synthetically lethal impact in tumors that are lacking NER capabilities. The DCRC is a cancer research institute within the Danish Cancer Society. The Danish Cancer Society is Denmark’s largest non-government organization and dedicates more than 60% of its budget to research, with the remainder shared between prevention and patient support initiatives. Lantern expects the data, genomic signatures and biological models generated from this collaboration to add millions of data points to RADR and help accelerate the development of new indications for LP-100 and LP-184. This collaboration, together with the growing power of the RADR platform, can potentially uncover new drug combinations using LP-100 and LP-184 for cancer treatments at a fraction of the cost of traditional drug development.
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The overall aim of the collaboration is to determine the most promising patient populations for future LP-100 (irofulven) and LP-184 therapy. The collaboration will focus on developing improved diagnostic tools to detect NER deficiency patient profiles more accurately. The research study conducted as part of the collaboration will use expanded mutational signature-based analyses to achieve this objective. The study will include a comprehensive analysis of breast, ovarian, prostate, lung, kidney, bladder, stomach, pancreatic and esophageal cancer. This collaboration will help determine how many patients and which patients can benefit for targeting NER deficiency and also help assess the overall market size for both LP-100 and LP-184 across multiple solid tumors.
"Inherent DNA repair deficiencies characterize a subset of many of our common tumor types and are increasingly relevant as markers of therapeutic responses. The focus on defining NER deficiencies as a potential marker for irofulven use is in line with our strategies on drug repurposing as well as personalized oncology," says Mef Nilbert, medical oncologist and research director at the DCRC.
The collaboration research will be led by Dr. Zoltan Szallasi, MD as principal investigator at DCRC. Dr. Szallasi serves joint appointments as Group Leader of the Translational Cancer Genomics department at DCRC and as Faculty, Computational Health Informatics Program (CHIP) and Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital affiliated with Harvard Medical School.
"Through our breakthrough approach of collaborating with internationally recognized research centers such as DCRC, we are able to leverage and grow our proprietary RADR A.I. platform with millions of additional data points to further our ability to rapidly discover biomarker signatures aimed at helping identify patients more likely to respond to cancer therapies, which we believe will significantly reduce development timelines and cost of treatment," commented Panna Sharma, CEO and President of Lantern Pharma Inc. "We are assembling a growing body of data supporting LP-184 and LP-100’s synthetic lethality to tumor cells with either NER or HR deficiency, and our collaboration with DCRC will further accelerate our path to clinical trials as well as provide opportunities for new trials and additional targeted indications."
LP-184 is a DNA-damaging small molecule drug candidate currently in preclinical development for certain genomically defined solid tumors, including pancreatic cancer and glioblastoma. As a next-generation acylfulvene class agent that preferentially damages DNA in cancer cells overexpressing certain biomarkers, LP-184 has the potential to be used as both monotherapy as well as a synergistic agent in combination with other drugs. LP-184 has been granted Orphan Drug Designation by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of malignant gliomas, as well as pancreatic cancer.
LP-100 exploits cancer cells’ deficiency in DNA repair mechanisms. LP-100 has the potential to be an important compound — either as monotherapy or in combination — for several challenging cancers that are impacting patients globally. LP-100 is in an existing genomic-signature guided phase 2 clinical trial in Denmark for patients with metastatic castration resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC). 9 patients (out of a targeted enrollment of 27) have been treated in the trial. The median overall survival (OS) for the initial group of 9 patients has been approximately 12.5 months, which is an improvement over other similar fourth-line treatment regimens for mCRPC.