Partnership to expand the clinical development of breast cancer drug candidate

The biotech company Lantern Pharma has announced a collaboration with TTC Oncology to expand the development of its breast cancer drug candidate.

Lantern Pharma has previously developed an artificial intelligence and machine learning platform to transform the cost, pace, and timeline of oncology drug discovery and development.

Now, through this latest collaboration, the company aims to use the insights from its AI platform to advance TTC Oncology’s first- and “best-in-class” drug candidate TTC-352 for recurrent ER+ breast cancer patients.

In US women, breast cancer remains the most commonly diagnosed cancer and second leading cause of cancer related deaths.

ER+ breast cancers are estimated to account for 75-80 per cent of all breast cancer cases and can have a recurrence rate between 13 per cent and 41 per cent.

Globally, the treatment of ER+ breast cancer is estimated to have a US$44bn market potential by 2027.

”It is of the utmost importance for cancer drug development to understand targeted tumour biology and mechanisms of resistance in order to select the patient population that will benefit the most from novel therapy,” said Dr Arkadiusz Dudek, TTC Oncology chief medical officer.

“We expect that by using Lantern’s RADR AI platform it can save us time and costs in the further successful clinical development of TTC-352 while providing important information for precision patient selection.”

The companies say the collaboration will be powered by the platform’s oncology-focused data points, algorithms and drug discovery and development modules and will be aimed at identifying biomarker or gene signatures to power potential patient selection for an upcoming clinical trial, characterising TTC-352’s mechanism of action and discovering additional treatment indications.

Panna Sharma, Lantern Pharma’s CEO and president, said: “Using AI insights generated by RADR, we are able to both sharpen existing clinical programmes and uncover additional unrealised clinical potential of Lantern’s and our collaborators’ drug candidates.

“We believe our AI-powered collaboration with TTC Oncology will accelerate the clinical development of TTC-352 for patients with metastatic ER+ breast cancer and will also identify new potential patient populations that can benefit from TTC-352 treatment.

Under the terms of the collaboration, Lantern Pharma is receiving an exclusive right to license TTC-352, including any collaboration intellectual property (IP), during an exclusive option period.

Additionally, Lantern and TTC will each participate in upfront, milestone, and royalty payments in the event a third party licenses IP resulting from the collaboration. No further financial details were disclosed.