Cancer - Allinky Biopharma

Cancer
Cancer is a devastating disease attracting the highest attention of the pharmaceutical industry and the healthcare providers. The many faces of cancer have hampered the development of new therapeutics beyond the traditional chemotherapy and the novel monoclonal antibodies with limited applications. The so called personalized medicine holds promise for more suited treatments for cancer diseases although this is lagging in time. Among the most interesting targets for the treatment of cancer are oncogenes which are genes that have cancer causing potential because they are often mutated or expressed at high levels in tumor cells. Ras protein family is the most common oncogene in human cancer, over expression or mutations that permanently activate Ras are found in one out of four of all human tumors. The survival of pancreatic, lung or breast cancer cells among other tumor cells depend, to a great extent, on the over activation of Ras proteins. Thus, pharmaceutical approaches to inhibit Ras protein appear very reasonable in order to develop novel anticancer therapeutics. In this regard, the advent of bioinformatics allow in silico design novel therapeutics that bind selectively to Ras proteins preventing their over activation. Allinky in close collaboration with the Severo Ochoa Molecular Biology Center located in Madrid (Spain) is developing Ras protein inhibitors targeting either over expressed or mutated Ras protein isoforms. The first generation of these novel compounds not only controls the growth of tumor cells but also prevent their transformation into metastatic cells. This first-in-class compound is initially being oriented towards the treatment of non small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).