We are a clinical-stage oncology company dedicated to unlocking a new paradigm in cancer therapeutics that addresses the significant unmet need in patients with oncogene amplified tumors by interrogating extrachromosomal DNA (ecDNA), a root cause of oncogene amplification observed in 14 to 17% of cancer patients. Our mission is to be the foremost biopharma company interrogating ecDNA biology to deliver transformative therapies that improve and extend the lives of patients with previously intractable oncogene amplified cancers.
ecDNA are large circular units of nuclear DNA that are a primary mechanism of gene amplification and are detected only in cancer cells, not in healthy cells. Despite tremendous advancements in treating cancer broadly, patients with oncogene amplified cancers generally derive little benefit from existing therapies, such as molecular targeted therapies or immunotherapies, and have worse survival rates than patients without oncogene amplification. Using our proprietary Spyglass platform, we identify targets essential for ecDNA functionality in oncogene amplified cancer cells, then design and develop small molecule drugs called ecDNA-directed therapeutic candidates (ecDTx) to inhibit those targets, with the aim to prevent cancer cells from using chromosomal instability (CIN) and ecDNA amplification biology to grow, adapt, and become resistant to existing therapies. Instead of directly targeting the proteins produced by amplified oncogenes, which is the approach of traditional targeted therapies, our ecDTx are intended to be synthetic lethal in tumor cells reliant on ecDNA amplification biology. In the context of drug development, synthetic lethality is a therapeutic approach wherein using a drug to inhibit one target is lethal to cancer cells harboring a specific genetic alteration to a second target, but not lethal to healthy cells that lack the genetic alteration to the second target. Accordingly, our ecDTx are designed to preferentially kill ecDNA-enabled cancer cells, but not healthy cells. They are engineered to disrupt the underlying cellular machinery that enables ecDNA or functional amplification.
