WATERTOWN, MA – April 21, 2015 – Blend Therapeutics, Inc., a biopharmaceutical company discovering and developing two distinct classes of targeted anti-cancer medicines to advance the treatment of patients with solid tumor cancers, presented preclinical data today on BTP-114, a novel personalized cisplatin prodrug, with demonstration of improved and sustained tumor growth inhibition in preclinical models as compared to the conventional platinum cytotoxic cancer drug, cisplatin. Results from preclinical studies were presented in a poster entitled “BTP-114: An albumin binding cisplatin prodrug with improved and sustained tumor growth inhibition” at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, Penn.
BTP-114 is Blend’s lead product candidate for which the company plans to file an Investigational New Drug (IND) application with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in Q2 2015. Once administered, BTP-114 rapidly conjugates to serum albumin in blood with a high degree of specificity, and is preferentially taken up by cancer cells with certain molecular profiles, resulting in enhanced DNA damage and cell death.
“We are excited by the novel mechanism of action of BTP-114 that leverages our growing understanding of disregulated cancer metabolism and the molecular underpinning of cancers, enabling the development of the first personalized platinum marking a major advance in the field of platinum anti-cancer agents,” said Richard Wooster, PhD, President of Research and Development of Blend. “Designed to overcome limitations of conventional platinum therapies which are the largest class of oncology drugs today, BTP-114 has the potential to increase the proportion of patients who respond and their duration of response to platinum-based therapies.”