Verseon’s Novel Anticancer Agents for Multidrug Resistant Tumors Presented at BIO-Europe 2017
08 November 2017 - 11:00PM
Business Wire
Verseon presented the first preclinical results on its novel
anticancer compounds at the BIO-Europe conference in Berlin
yesterday. The data suggest that these drug candidates may be
especially well-suited for the treatment of solid tumors resistant
to existing chemotherapy agents.
One of the most common ways in which cancer cells render
chemotherapies ineffective is by triggering an overproduction of
transport proteins that expel many organic substances, including
drugs. Dr. Anirban Datta, Verseon’s Director of Discovery Biology,
presented data showing that the new tubulin inhibitors are
significantly less susceptible to this mode of tumor resistance. In
addition, results from in vitro studies show that Verseon’s
compounds maintain efficacy across multiple cell lines that are
resistant to common chemotherapy agents.
Verseon’s drug candidates inhibit microtubule formation by
targeting the protein tubulin. They work by blocking blood vessel
growth and preventing cell division (mitosis), two proven treatment
strategies for cancer. The data presented at BIO-Europe also show
that lead candidates have pharmacokinetics suitable for
administration as infusion, an important prerequisite for inclusion
in infusion-based chemotherapy regimens.
“There is an ongoing need for anticancer agents less susceptible
to tumor resistance that can be used in conjunction with existing
and new drugs,” said Dr. Datta. “The fact that our tubulin
inhibitors are mostly unaffected by major transporters could change
the standard of care for cancer chemotherapy. In particular, using
transporter overexpression as a biomarker to drive treatment
decisions could lead to more effective precision second-line
therapy.”
Verseon’s diverse pipeline of drug candidates is driven by the
company’s computational drug discovery platform, which is able to
access many more drug-like molecules than are available to
conventional pharmaceutical companies. Verseon currently has drug
programs in anticoagulation, diabetic macular edema, hereditary
angioedema, and oncology. The company will present the latest
results in its anticoagulant program, which is expected to enter
phase I clinical trials in 2018, at the American Heart
Association’s Scientific Sessions later this month.
About Verseon’s oncology program
Verseon plans to use its promising class of tubulin inhibitors
to target multidrug resistant cancers. Several drug candidates show
potency in functional and cellular assays. Furthermore, Verseon’s
inhibitors maintain their efficacy across multiple
chemotherapy-resistant cancer cell lines and are mostly unaffected
by the overexpression of common transporters, a primary source of
multidrug resistance.
About Verseon
Verseon Corporation (www.verseon.com, AIM: VSN) is a
technology-based pharmaceutical company that pairs a proprietary,
computational drug discovery platform with a comprehensive in-house
chemistry and biology workflow to develop novel therapeutics that
are unlikely to be found using conventional methods. The Company is
applying its platform to a growing drug pipeline and currently has
four active drug programs in the areas of anticoagulation, diabetic
macular edema, hereditary angioedema, and oncology.
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