Lantern Pharma Inc. announced a strategic AI-driven collaboration with Oregon Therapeutics to optimize the development of its first-in-class protein disulfide isomerase (PDI) inhibitor drug candidate XCE853 in novel and targeted cancer indications. Lantern will be leveraging its proprietary RADR® AI platform to uncover biomarkers and efficacy-associated signatures of XCE853 across solid tumors that can aid in precision development. Collaborative efforts are expected to identify biomarker signatures that can be used to stratify tumors most responsive to XCE853 and guide potential future clinical development and patient selection.

Oregon Therapeutics is developing XCE853 in various cancer indications, including drug-resistant ovarian and pancreatic cancer, certain hematological cancers and several pediatric cancers including CNS cancers. PDIs are promising targets for cancer therapy raising clinical interest recently notably for their potential in cancers of poor prognosis like breast cancer or ovarian cancer. Up-regulated expression of PDIs was found to be associated with worse clinical outcome in numerous cancers such as hepatocellular carcinoma, as well as breast and ovarian cancers.

PDIs are protein chaperones and are central to maintaining cancer cell metabolism, additionally PDI inhibitors can cause cancer cell death through the accumulation of impaired proteins and dysregulated cellular stress responses. A combination of these effects is known as proteotoxicity, a unique and promising therapeutic strategy that may be especially effective in targeting cancers that are resistant to therapy. In the US, nearly 612,000 people are projected to die from cancer in 2024 and, resistance to anticancer drugs will be implicated in 90% of those deaths.

To date, no PDI inhibitor has reached the clinic due to the complexities related to selecting and mapping the molecules that will most accurately target the right PDI enzymes. There are more than 20 PDI enzymes, with each playing a slightly different and often biologically redundant role. Oregon Therapeutic?s lead drug-candidate XCE853 is known to target PDIs of specific interest for cancer.

Lantern Pharma and Oregon Therapeutics believe that computational tools, including foundational models, machine learning and large-scale molecular analysis can offer an ideal and streamlined pathway for breaking through these data and decision complexities ? making RADR® the perfect platform for better informing the role XCE853 can play in effective cancer treatment.