“Reglagene is an order of magnitude more exciting than my previous work, and a tremendous clinical opportunity. It’s what I have been trying to accomplish as a scientist for the last forty years. Now is the time to change the way we fight cancer.”
-Dr. Laurence Hurley, Chief Scientific Officer
A new paradigm for fighting cancer.
Chemotherapy works by indiscriminately damaging cellular DNA causing cells to die. The hope of oncologists and patients is for chemotherapy to disproportionately kill more cancer cells than healthy cells. Unfortunately, the chemotherapy treatments known today poorly differentiate between healthy and cancer cells.
Life-saving advances have been made in the early detection and safe treatment of cancer. Yet over sixty percent of cancer patients with solid tumors still receive traditional chemotherapy during their treatment journey. These toxic therapies remain as mainstays of the oncologist’s toolbox.
Since the late 90s, Dr. Laurence Hurley has been on a journey to discover the functional relevance of unique four stranded structures found in DNA called quadruplexes. By applying innovative technology created in Dr. Hurley's lab, Reglagene is developing a new class of medicine known as Precision Chemotherapy. By selectively targeting specific quadruplex structures, we can mimic traditional chemotherapy to damage DNA selectively in cancer cells, without harming healthy cells. Precision Chemotherapy will change the way we fight cancer, enabling oncologists to fight cancer safely.
In preclinical testing, Reglagene’s agents have demonstrated effective anti-cancer activity in a variety of patient-derived samples via DNA damage inducement without unwanted toxicity in healthy tissues.
Why Precision Chemotherapy?
Patients fighting cancer deserve treatments that work safely and effectively. Traditional chemotherapy has a high treatment failure rate and extremely high toxicity levels. Many patients and their families fear the word chemotherapy as the toxicity of these treatments often leave lasting effects even after successful intervention. Precision Chemotherapy can change this paradigm. Precision Chemotherapy offers safe and effective cancer therapy that can be taken in the comfort of a patient's home.
Fighting cancer is challenging because every patient’s disease is different, typically driven by multiple genetic mutations. The ideal situation is to provide oncologists with multiple therapy options based on the genetic makeup of an individual patient’s disease.
Combination therapy is the simultaneous use of multiple anti-cancer agents and is the standard of care in cancer treatment. Although, Reglagene is developing Precision Chemotherapy medicines to be effective as monotherapy, we recognize that our medicines will need to work in combination with other cancer treatments to provide patients with the best outcomes.
DNA Damage Response (DDR) Inhibitors are a nascent drug class that holds the promise of improving outcomes for cancer patients. DDR Inhibitors work by preventing cancer cells from repairing DNA damage. However, these agents rarely work well as monotherapy. The obvious clinical combination to improve the performance of DDR Inhibitors is to combine these with DNA damage inducers, i.e. chemotherapy. In clinical settings, the combinations of DDR Inhibitors with traditional chemotherapy typically result in heightened toxicity that forces treatment discontinuation. With its Precision Chemotherapy approach, Reglagene aims to become the combination medicine of choice for the DDR Inhibitor therapy class. Preclinical combinations of Reglagene’s Precision Chemotherapy with DDR Inhibitors demonstrate additive (1+1=2) and synergistic (1+1=3) anti-cancer effects.
