Onchilles Pharma is a small pharmaceutical company based in San Diego, USA. They work in oncology pharmacy, specifically in innate immune biology; this means that they primarily develop drugs for cancer patients and these drugs work on patients’ immune systems. The name of their first drug is N17350, and it just got approval to proceed to in-human clinical trials.
The drug N17350 is based on research carried out in Lev Becker’s “The Becker Laboratory” at the University of Chicago, and published in Cell. Their research originally found that neutrophil elastase (ELANE), which is the major human protein released by the immune system to battle cancer. ELANE’s porcine analog is porcine pancreatic elastase (PPE.) Becker’s lab found that combining ELANE & PPE into one drug maximized the killing activity of cancer cells, along with the limited exposure to the host.
Achilles Pharma’s drug N17350 mobilizes the ELANE-mediated pathway, which ultimately results in cancer cell death. The preclinical studies have only been tested in-vitro (outside of the body) in both human and mouse cells. See below for an example of how in-vitro testing works. The studies do, however show that N17350 has better cancer-killing efficacy than other chemotherapy drugs that are currently used all around the world. They only saw that their drug has not been toxic to non-cancer cells from six different sources of human and mouse cells. Since this is going to be a systemic drug, it may encounter more than six types of non-cancerous human cells. Therefore, additional studies need to be conducted to analyze the true side-effect profile of this drug.
On top of the development of N17350, Onchilles has also developed a new mechanism in which tumor-associated macrophages help tumors evade detection by the immune system. The antibodies they have developed seem to be promising since they have been validated on human patient samples in preclinical trials.
N17350 is a promising drug for the future of cancer immunotherapies, especially considering this is a first drug in its class. This seems as though it is a promising drug for many cancer patients, especially considering the difficulties of living with cancer, along with the aggressive side effect profile of many cancer drugs.
References
1 Cui C, Chakraborty K, Tang XA, et al. Neutrophil elastase selectively kills cancer cells and attenuates tumorigenesis. Cell. 2021;184(12):3163-3177.e21. doi:10.1016/j.cell.2021.04.016
2 https://onchillespharma.com
