$2.7 Million Grant Awarded for NSCLC Research

Trethera Corp. has been awarded a new $2.7 million Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The award evaluates the combination of Trethera’s lead drug candidate, TRE-515, with KRAS inhibitor therapies to treat non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Lung cancer is responsible for more deaths annually than breast, prostate and colorectal cancer combined — with NSCLC causing 80 percent of lung cancer deaths. The grant will fund testing TRE-515 with standard of care KRAS inhibitors (KRASi) in NSCLC mouse models to inform future clinical trials.

TRE-515 inhibits deoxycytidine kinase (dCK), the key enzyme for the nucleoside salvage pathway that becomes activated and essential for abnormal cell growth in autoimmune diseases and cancer. Consistent with observations that dCK activity is relatively minimal in the regulated cell division of healthy cells, inhibiting dCK with TRE-515 has demonstrated favorable safety in addition to clinical benefit in ongoing first-in-human trials.

“We are excited to receive this grant award, which underscores the strong mechanistic rationale for pairing a first-in-class dCK inhibitor with KRAS-targeted therapies,” said UCLA Assistant Professor Evan Abt, PhD, and grant co-investigator. “KRAS inhibitor resistance remains a major challenge, and our data suggest that blocking the nucleoside salvage pathway directly disrupts a key metabolic escape route used by lung cancer cells.”