Lantern Pharma and NCI expand oncology partnership

Lantern Pharma and the US National Institutes of Health unit National Cancer Institute’s (NCI) Developmental Therapeutics Branch (DTB) have announced the extension of their oncology collaboration for first in human clinical trials for drug candidates LP-184 and LP-284.

The latest move follows the identification of various gene signatures that predict a tumour’s possible response to these drug candidates of Lantern.

LP-184 is being analysed as a novel drug for a variety of genetically specified solid tumours, such as pancreatic cancer and glioblastoma multiforme (GBM).

Furthermore, LP-284 is being evaluated for specific leukaemias and lymphomas.

Using the data and capability offered by CellMiner and CellMinerCDB platforms of NCI, the second phase of the partnership will analyse further multiomic data to carry out precise drug response correlation.

In addition, this phase will comprise data from the Broad Institute’s Project Achilles, incorporated into the CellMiner platform, to assess the comprehensive drug portfolio of Lantern to various other anti-cancer therapies under special genetic as well as molecular conditions.

Lantern will be able to further improve the multiomic signatures that could predict the efficacy of the drug into a curated list of biomarkers with the additional data and enhanced analytic toolbox, comprising epigenetic, proteomic and microRNA data types.

These biomarkers can be used in gene editing as well as CRISPR technology studies to derisk development decisions and establish further treatment options.