At Pathfinder, our goal is to invent better therapies for cancer patients.
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Why cancer?
The simple answer is: There is still tremendous need.
Although great progress has been made in early diagnosis and treatment of many types of cancer over the past few decades, patients with recurring disease, advanced stage at diagnosis, or particularly aggressive cancers can quickly run out of options. Even patients whose disease is responding to existing drugs typically suffer extensive side effects that significantly diminish quality of life.
At Pathfinder, we believe there is need for oral drugs with better efficacy and fewer side effects.
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How are we approaching the discovery of new cancer drugs?
We are interested in the ways that cancer cells exploit existing metabolic pathways that are used by healthy cells only in times of stress. In other words, we are interested in the ways that cancer cells use the back up systems in our healthy cells.
Cancer cells consume lots of sugar. For almost a century, scientists have known that cancer cells prefer to use a shortcut for metabolizing glucose. This path is not as efficient at extracting the energy stored in a glucose molecule as the primary pathway, but it quickly provides some energy – and it doesn’t require oxygen. There’s also some evidence that the molecular pieces leftover from this shortcut can get recycled as building blocks for new cancer cells.
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Our research is focused on ways to stop the shortcut metabolic pathway without interfering with the primary metabolic pathway favored by healthy cells. We believe that this approach can provide drugs that are effective across a broad range of cancer types, but also are selective for cancer cells – and thus avoid the toxicity associated with conventional chemotherapies.
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Our efforts to date have identified novel structures that inhibit the pathway of interest in a test tube. There is a great deal more work to discover a drug that works in people, but this is an encouraging start.
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