Oscotec (039200.KQ), a South Korean biotech company, is establishing a dedicated in-house organization to build a platform for identifying targets involved in cancer drug resistance and developing resistance-overcoming anticancer therapies.
The company said Tuesday it has launched a new "Platform Technology Team" within its research center. Oscotec also recruited Dr. Regis Grailhe, who has led the image-based drug screening platform at the Institut Pasteur Korea for more than a decade, to head the new unit.
The team was created to build a platform that systematically searches, analyzes and validates resistance mechanisms and related targets—one of the major challenges in oncology—and to discover new resistance-overcoming anticancer candidates.
The Platform Technology Team plans to establish a high-throughput/high-content screening (HTS/HCS) system that observes in real time how cancer cells develop resistance to existing anticancer drugs and identifies resistance-related targets through single-cell-level image analysis powered by artificial intelligence (AI). The team also plans to expand its research using AI and systems biology-based analysis to identify the key drivers behind cancer cells' acquisition of resistance during treatment and to uncover core targets involved in resistance formation.
Oscotec is currently validating the potential to intervene in cancer cells' treatment resistance process through OCT-598, a resistance-overcoming anticancer agent in Phase 1 clinical trials. OCT-598 is a dual EP2/EP4 inhibitor that modulates signaling transmitted by prostaglandin E2 (PGE2) through the EP2 and EP4 receptors.
In addition to OCT-598, Oscotec is developing four resistance-overcoming anticancer pipelines including ONC1-3. Going forward, the company plans to continuously discover new targets specialized in cancer resistance mechanisms through the Platform Technology Team and expand its resistance-overcoming anticancer pipeline applicable to various cancer types and treatment combinations.
"Over the past two years or so of research, we have completed the basic proof of concept for anticancer drug resistance, and we established the Platform Technology Team to fully expand and apply this work so that we can quickly take the lead in the new therapeutic modality of resistance-overcoming anticancer agents," Oscotec CEO Yoon Tae-young said. "We plan to build a platform that discovers customized targets that play a key role in the emergence of resistance to various existing standard anticancer therapies."
