Empowered Patient Podcast New Inhibitor Drug Transforms Cancer Treatment Accessibility with Dan Schmitt Actuate Therapeutics
Dan Schmitt, President and CEO of Actuate Therapeutics, is developing a cancer therapy that inhibits GSK3β, a key enzyme that is hijacked in cancer cells to drive tumor growth. Inhibiting this enzyme can impact the cancer cells and stimulate an immune response against the tumor. Actuate selected metastatic pancreatic cancer as their first target due to unmet need and promising data for their lead drug candidate. This could represent a significant advancement in the treatment of metastatic pancreatic cancer, offering a new standard-of-care option.
Dan explains, "So, GSK-3β is a known quantity across a number of inflammatory diseases. It was understood when we first started the company that, particularly in cancer cells, GSK is hijacked in its activity. Basically it's been shown that in normal cells, GSK-3β sits in the cytoplasmic domain and there it's involved in multiple paths, basically in glucose metabolism. But in cancer cells, it translocates into the nuclear compartment, and there it's accumulated at much higher levels and then sits upstream of a pro-oncogenic set of pathways, all mediated by NF-κB. NF-κB is notorious in cancer. It regulates gene expression involved in tumor growth and progression, chemoresistance, and protects tumor cells from death."
"So it's been very difficult to target NF-κB directly, but we can target GSK-3β directly, specifically and potently, and therefore downregulate those key oncogenic processes. And that's really where we started the company, that set of activities of this protein. What's been shown since we've been in the clinic is that there is also a resulting upregulation of immune response from the host towards the cancer itself based on this inhibition of GSK-3β as well."
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