Preclinical toxicology and safety pharmacology of the first-in-class GADD45β/MKK7 inhibitor and clinical candidate, DTP3

Aberrant NF-κB activity drives oncogenesis and cell survival in multiple myeloma (MM) and many other cancers. However, despite an aggressive effort by the pharmaceutical industry over the past 30 years, no specific IκBα kinase (IKK)β/NF-κB inhibitor has been clinically approved, due to the multiple dose-limiting toxicities of conventional NF-κB-targeting drugs. To overcome this barrier to therapeutic NF-κB inhibition, we developed the first-in-class growth arrest and DNA-damage-inducible (GADD45)β/mitogen-activated protein kinase kinase (MKK)7 inhibitor, DTP3, which targets an essential, cancer-selective cell-survival module downstream of the NF-κB pathway. As a result, DTP3 specifically kills MM cells, ex vivo and in vivo, ablating MM xenografts in mice, with no apparent adverse effects, nor evident toxicity to healthy cells. Here, we report the results from the preclinical regulatory pharmacodynamic (PD), safety pharmacology, pharmacokinetic (PK), and toxicology programmes of DTP3, leading to the approval for clinical trials in oncology. These results demonstrate that DTP3 combines on-target-selective pharmacology, therapeutic anticancer efficacy, favourable drug-like properties, long plasma half-life and good bioavailability, with no target-organs of toxicity and no adverse effects preclusive of its clinical development in oncology, upon daily repeat-dose administration in both rodent and non-rodent species. Our study underscores the clinical potential of DTP3 as a conceptually novel candidate therapeutic selectively blocking NF-κB survival signalling in MM and potentially other NF-κB-driven cancers

The combination of circulating Ang1 and Tie2 levels predicts progression-free survival advantage in bevacizumab-treated patients with ovarian cancer

PURPOSE: Randomized ovarian cancer trials, including ICON7, have reported improved progression-free survival (PFS) when bevacizumab was added to conventional cytotoxic therapy. The improvement was modest prompting the search for predictive biomarkers for bevacizumab. EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN: Pre-treatment training (n = 91) and validation (n = 114) blood samples were provided by ICON7 patients. Plasma concentrations of 15 angio-associated factors were determined using validated multiplex ELISAs. Our statistical approach adopted PFS as the primary outcome measure and involved (i) searching for biomarkers with prognostic relevance or which related to between-individual variation in bevacizumab effect; (ii) unbiased determination of cut-offs for putative biomarker values; (iii) investigation of biologically meaningfully predictive combinations of putative biomarkers; and (iv) replicating the analysis on candidate biomarkers in the validation dataset. RESULTS: The combined values of circulating Ang1 and Tie2 concentrations predicted improved PFS in bevacizumab-treated patients in the training set. Using median concentrations as cut-offs, high Ang1/low Tie2 values were associated with significantly improved PFS for bevacizumab-treated patients in both data sets (median: 23.0 months versus 16.2, p=0.003 for the interaction of Ang1-Tie2-treatment in Cox regression analysis. The prognostic indices derived from the training set also distinguished high and low probability for progression in the validation set (p = 0.008), generating similar values for HR (0.21 versus 0.27) between treatment and control arms for patients with high Ang1 and low Tie2 values. CONCLUSIONS: The combined values of Ang1 and Tie2 are predictive biomarkers for improved PFS in bevacizumab-treated patients with ovarian cancer. These findings need to be validated in larger trials due to the limitation of sample size in this study

Molecular bacterial load assay, a culture-free biomarker for rapid and accurate quantification of sputum Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacillary load during treatment

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Clinical proof of concept for a safe and effective NF-κB-targeting strategy in multiple myeloma

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