Comment by inigyou
1 day ago
How does it avoid targeting KRAS in healthy cells? Or is this another form of chemotherapy where we're trying our hardest to deliver the right amount of poison that kills the cancer before it kills the rest of you?
1 day ago
How does it avoid targeting KRAS in healthy cells? Or is this another form of chemotherapy where we're trying our hardest to deliver the right amount of poison that kills the cancer before it kills the rest of you?
It doesn't. Cancerous cells have a much higher dependency on RAS signaling to survive, so it's a drug that kills everything that's replicating via RAS signaling, much like standard chemotherapy kills cells in general that are reproducing more quickly.
However this is just the first version of the drug, it can be combined with other modalities to allow more selective targeting of cancer versus not cancer cells (e.g antibody-drug conjugation). And when used in earlier stage cancers, rather than the advanced cancers in this first clinical trial, there's the possibility of lower dosing that has less strong side effects.
This is just the first attack that has ever broken through to hit a key weakness of some cancers. It's the start of learning, a breakthrough that will launch refinements, enhancements, and a ton of innovation. That sort of innovation is sometimes derided as "me-too" drugs, and not meaningful, but some of the biggest advancements in cancer care have been from taking very hard to tolerate treatments and making them more tolerable and refined and better for patients, allowing longer and more thorough killing of cancer cells. I would expect we will see a lot of that here, as well as work towards combinations with other drugs.
This drug targets cells with a KRAS mutation that locks the KRAS switch in the ON state, driving uncontrolled growth. Cells with this mutation are abnormal and predisposed to becoming cancer ... so by definition are not healthy.