Cancer comprises the second highest cause of death for people in the United States, with over 600,000 fatalities annually. More than 100 different types of cancers, with a myriad of causes and clinical presentations have been characterized that contribute to this figure. Cancer can affect a variety of organs and tissues, from the brain to the blood. It may be attributable to an underlying mutation in the patient’s DNA, to a cancer cell’s metabolic reprogramming through epigenetic mechanisms, or to a patient’s underperforming immune system. Despite the variety, the literature describes that there are hallmarks of cancer, certain shared presentations regarding how different types of cancer phenotypes have departed from homeostasis on a cellular level.

At Prosetta, we focused our oncology discovery efforts on uncontrolled proliferation, one critical hallmark of cancer, and identified that two of our structurally-unrelated protein-assembly modulator compounds were capable of arresting proliferation in cancer cells. We hypothesized that some of our anti-viral assembly modulating compounds would display anti-proliferative properties due to the parallels in observed pathologies because at least seven different viruses — Epstein-Barr virus, hepatitis B virus, hepatitis C virus, human T-lymphotropic virus 1, human papillomavirus, Kaposi sarcoma-associated herpesvirus, and Merkel cell polyomavirus — are known to be directly oncogenic through their alteration of the cellular environment and/or impairment of the host’s innate immune system defenses.

Prosetta’s identified oncology-active assembly modulating compounds which have shown broad pan-cancer efficacy. Between data generated in-house, by the Eurofins Oncopanel, and the National Cancer Institute’s 60 cell line screen- both of our structurally-unrelated oncology compounds have demonstrated activity against approximately 75 different cancers.