Arjuna Therapeutics

Currently, around 30% of cancers have no curative treatment that can be offered at diagnosis. In most cancers, it is metastasis that kills patients whereas current therapies are largely targeted to the primary cancer. While therapies targeting abnormal proteins resulting from genetic mutations have proved successful, tumour evolution means that often response is temporary.

We are taking a different approach-targeting abnormal mitochondria rather than genetic mutations. Ag5, our first drug, targets tumour cells generating extremely high levels of reactive oxygen species (ROS), a very large group representing over 25% of all cancers including some of the most urgent unmet needs in medicine today, such as pancreatic cancer and glioblastoma multiforme. There are no curative treatments for these conditions, and very large numbers of patients.

We are developing the first-in-class of a novel therapeutic agent. Ag5 is the first of the TMC family of entirely novel small molecules which penetrate freely into tumours and across the blood brain barrier.

The cellular mechanism of Ag5 is novel, acting via mitochondrial synthetic lethality, demonstrating significant efficacy in mouse models of brain cancer and lung cancer (specifically KRAS mutant non-small cell lung cancer -NSCLC-) while exhibiting a low level of toxicity to the host animal. The reason for this is that Ag5 is only active in cells generating high levels of ROS in conjunction with high levels of antioxidants-a phenotype, found only in a proportion of cancers and absent in non-cancerous cells. Furthermore, our agents are extremely stable at room temperature and orally bioavailable, meaning they are practical to treat a large number of patients. Multiple peer-reviewed academic publications relating to this technology have been published (and more are pending) by our scientific team.

In the long run, our aim is to make solid tumours (such as non-small cell lung cancer, pancreatic and glioblastoma) into chronic, survivable conditions by using Ag5 to target cancer metastasis.

Furthermore, radiotherapy is a component of at least 50% of curative treatment regimens and has remained essentially unchanged technically for the last two decades. A medication which sensitises cancer cells to boost the effects of radiation while protecting vital nearby structures will very rapidly become the standard of care for multiple cancers and will transform clinical practice globally. In fact, we have demonstrated that with Ag5 – the agent is able to increase the effect of radiotherapy specifically in tumour cells allowing lower radiation doses and preventing resistance of the cancer to radiotherapy treatment.

When fully executed, Ag5 will be one of the most valuable cancer medications.

We can now manufacture Ag5 at scale and pharmaceutical purity. We are raising a bridge round to allow us to determine optimal dosing in animal models to enable a Series A round to commence clinical testing in human patients.