Mark A. Goldsmith:
[Slide 2]
On behalf of the employees of Revolution Medicines
and our many collaborators and partners, its my pleasure to welcome you to this R&D review following multiple exciting scientific presentations by our collaborating investigators at the Triple and ESMO meetings.
Our companys mission is to revolutionize treatment for patients with RAS-addicted cancers through the discovery,
development and delivery of innovative, targeted medicines.
Today, Ill begin by briefly reviewing our pioneering class of drug candidates that
target the oncogenic RAS(ON) drivers of common, life-threatening cancers.
Next, Dr. Steve Kelsey, our president of R&D, will recap the recent
presentations on our unprecedented RASMULTI inhibitor (RMC-6236) and RASG12C-selective inhibitor (RMC-6291), our first two RAS(ON) inhibitors that have shown differentiated and promising initial clinical profiles.
And then Dr. Wei Lin, our Chief Medical Officer, will summarize our initial single agent and combination development strategies aiming to deliver durable
clinical benefit broadly to patients with RAS-addicted cancers.
[Slide 4]
The fundamental biologic principle behind our work is that excessive RAS(ON) signaling caused by tumor RAS mutations drives malignant growth in many human
cancers.
These oncogenic mutations can occur in any of the natural isoforms of RAS KRAS, NRAS or HRAS and most frequently occur at
mutational hotspots at amino acids G12, G13 or Q61.
Such mutations are responsible for over 200,000 new cancer diagnoses in the US alone each year, and
in particular, are frequent causes of lung, pancreatic and colorectal cancer.
[Slide 5]
Innovative work by Kevan Shokat and Jon Ostrem paved the way for first generation inhibitors that bind to the KRASG12C mutant in the inactive, or OFF, form and prevent conversion into the active, or ON, form. We have taken a very different approach developing oral compounds that bind to and inhibit the
active, or ON, form of RAS. We built an industrial-strength product engine incorporating a vision and early work by Greg Verdine and colleagues at Warp Drive Bio, a company we acquired five years ago.
We call our compounds tri-complex inhibitors, since they are designed to bind selectively and with high affinity to a
relatively flat surface on the disease target by forming tri-complex structures that contain the disease target, a highly abundant cellular chaperone protein, such as
cyclophilin-A and the tri-complex inhibitor bound in a pocket between them. Drug candidates in our collection of more than 20,000 design-based RAS inhibitors directly
and rapidly inhibit the intended oncogenic RAS(ON) cancer drivers in tumor cells, and induce deep and durable suppression of RAS cancer signaling by a mechanism of action that defies common ways that tumors can resist RAS(OFF) inhibitors.
The studies we will review today have provided compelling clinical validation of the first two RAS(ON) Inhibitors as single agents and, we believe, for this
new class of inhibitors broadly.
[Slide 6]
Today we will
touch on several of our six named development-stage RAS(ON) inhibitors that, as a group, were designed to treat nearly all patients with RAS cancers.
The
first of these investigational drugs, RMC-6236, is clearly unique in that it potently binds to and inhibits every form of K, N or HRAS weve ever tested, including nearly all known oncogenic variants as
well as the wild-type, or normal, RAS proteins. We call this bold compound a RASMULTI(ON) inhibitor.
The other RAS(ON) inhibitors in our pipeline are designed as mutant-selective compounds targeting individual oncogenic RAS variants.
[Slide 7]