At Cincinnati Children’s, we answer the call of “incurable”, “poor prognosis”, or “at risk” by finding a solution or inventing a better way. If necessity is the mother of invention, then adapting to adversity is its father.
Cincinnati Children’s Innovation Ventures (CCIV) works to attract, identify, and triage internal innovation, with a focus on developing products that will reach patients. A goal for the team is to encourage every medical center employee to imagine new approaches to providing care, by inventing new technologies that save or improve lives.
A prime example of taking new approaches was the 2020 launch of Kurome Therapeutics, a preclinical stage company developing novel therapies to target cancer cells’ adaptive resistance mechanisms. Kurome’s initial focus is on improving the health and survival of poor prognosis acute myeloid leukemia (AML) patients, and may potentially expand its focus to work across a range of hematopoietic cancers, including pre-leukemic conditions such as myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS). Collectively, more than 30,000 new cases of MDS and AML are diagnosed in the United States each year. The median survival time for MDS is only 2.5 years after diagnosis, and the 5-year survival rate for AML is only 27 percent.
Kurome’s approach takes aim at a way that cancer cells evade the effects of chemotherapy, a process called adaptive resistance. Kurome is developing inhibitors to target the IRAK1/4 kinase complex to create a two-in-one attack against cancers that are drug resistant, also known as refractory cancers. Ongoing experiments have shown the combined compound’s ability to block the multiple mutant proteins that cause AML, while at the same time, subverting the cancer cells’ ability to resist the compound’s effects. A more thorough understanding of the drug resistance process will help Kurome find ways to improve therapy options for patients with refractory cancers, keeping them in remission longer.