TxinnoBioscience Inc. products

Txinno Bioscience is developing anti-cancer treatments focused on two intertwined aspects of physiology of tumor tissue. The first one is defined as tumor-intrinsic factors which are either genes or signaling pathways of tumor cells to directly control tumor cell proliferation or survival. Corresponding assets are ULK1 inhibitor, target S inhibitor and target Y inhibitor related to RAS signaling pathway. The other one is defined as tumor-extrinsic factors which are various signaling pathways operating in stromal cells other than tumor cells and promoting cancer cells to survive. Corresponding assets are ENPP1 inhibitor and target Z inhibitor controlling STING signaling pathway.

In vitro kinase assay using purified enzyme played a fundamental role in developing variety of different kinase inhibitors for many years. Although testing inhibitor compound in this assay is usually robust depending on the assay conditions, it has obvious limitations that are difficult to improve; 1) activity of inhibitor is likely over-estimated because ATP concentration used in assay is lower than the one inside the cells (millimolar range), 2) it is not trivial to purify recombinant protein to have properties, like post-translational modification and so on, that are close to the enzyme produced inside the cells.

Ectonucleotide pyrophosphatase/phosphodiesterase 1 (ENPP1), is a type II transmembrane protein with nucleotide pyrophosphatase and phosphodiesterase enzymatic activities. Recently, ENPP1 has been found to play an important role in regulating STING pathway. By hydrolyzing cGAMP (natural ligand of STING) into AMP and GMP, ENPP1 negatively regulates STING-mediated type I interferon production and subsequently prevents innate immune response against tumor. It was suggested that cancer cells acquire immune evasiveness by increasing ENPP1 expression, reflecting over-expression of ENPP1 in many different cancer types.

RAS GTPase family has 3 members encoding KRAS, HRAS and NRAS proteins which are involved in controlling normal growth signal. RAS GTPases are also well-known oncogenes that drive tumorigenesis when mutation is acquired.