Feb 28, 2022

Tim Clackson is the President and CEO of Theseus Pharmaceuticals which has a mission to outsmart cancer resistance by developing pan-variant tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) that are designed to hit different types of cancer cell mutations. The goals of the therapy are to delay treatment resistant cancer as well as effectively deal with the variety of cancer mutations once they have occurred.

Tim explains, "The unfortunate truth is that nearly all types of tumors at some point are going to develop resistance. We are at this stage now where some tumors that are caught early can be really cured and go into long-term remission. Still, there's a substantial portion of tumor types and certainly those that are caught a little bit later that unfortunately show an almost inevitable evolution of resistance. So, then the challenge becomes, can you delay how long that resistance takes to emerge? And then can you come up with therapies or approaches that will hopefully substantially prolong the post resistance treatment with a different therapy?"

"So kinase is a name for a family of proteins that often goes bad in cancer. Often the mutations are in kinases, and our approach is really to develop what are called kinase inhibitors, tyrosine kinase inhibitors or TKIs. There are many TKIs already developed, but we believe that it's really important to develop a particular kind that we call a pan-variant inhibitor. So that is a molecule that is designed to hit any of the different flavors of resistance cancer that you can find in a patient. Unfortunately, one of the biggest problems in cancer treatment, especially when you have a cancer with a particular driver, is that you find multiple different types of resistance in the same patient."

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