NEW YORK – Lantern Pharma on Monday said it is collaborating with the Danish Cancer Society and Research Center to further develop its investigational drugs LP-100 and LP-184 against tumors with nucleotide excision repair, or NER, deficiencies.
Currently, Lantern is developing LP-100 for metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer and using a genomic signature to identify best responders in a Phase II trial in Denmark. LP-184 is in preclinical development for pancreatic cancer and glioblastoma. Both drugs have shown to be synthetically lethal to tumors with NER deficiencies. Lantern expects that the collaboration with DCRC will generate additional data, genomic signatures, and biological models, and allow it to expand these drugs into new indications and discover new therapeutic combinations.
"The overall aim of the collaboration is to determine the most promising patient populations for future LP-100 (irofulven) and LP-184 therapy," Lantern said in a statement. "The collaboration will focus on developing improved diagnostic tools to detect NER deficiency patient profiles more accurately."
Dallas-based Lantern and DCRC, which is a cancer research institute within the Danish Cancer Society, will conduct a study in which they'll use expanded mutational signature analyses to identify new biomarker-defined indications in breast, ovarian, prostate, lung, kidney, bladder, stomach, pancreatic, and esophageal cancers.
"Inherent DNA repair deficiencies characterize a subset of many of our common tumor types and are increasingly relevant as markers of therapeutic responses," Mef Nilbert, medical oncologist and research director at the DCRC, said in a statement. "The focus on defining NER deficiencies as a potential marker for irofulven use is in line with our strategies on drug repurposing as well as personalized oncology."
The collaboration will also allow Lantern to grow the underlying evidence utilized by its Response Algorithm for Drug Positioning & Rescue, or RADR, machine-learning platform for biomarker discovery. "We are assembling a growing body of data supporting LP-184 and LP-100's synthetic lethality to tumor cells with either NER or [homologous recombination] deficiency, and our collaboration with DCRC will further accelerate our path to clinical trials as well as provide opportunities for new trials and additional targeted indications," Lantern CEO Panna Sharma said in a statement.