Ovarian cancer
Epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) is a terrible disease that affects greater than 1 in 70 women in North America. The 5-year survival rate for all stages is only 35% to 38% clearly illustrating the urgent needs in this disease. One of the ways to progress towards fulfilling these needs, is to identify new and more specific molecular targets. Alethia has directed its ovarian cancer program to address these therapeutic requirements.
By exploiting an innovative discovery platform, analysis of subtracted cDNA libraries from five ovarian tumors resulted in the identification of hundreds of genes that exhibited increased expression compared to low malignancy potential tumors. Alethia’s research team has applied various filters to select the best ovarian cancer-specific candidates and determined the tissue-specific expression of all identified genes showing up-regulated expression in malignant tumors. This effort led to the prioritization of several secreted or membrane-anchored proteins that exhibited over-expression in a large proportion of ovarian tumors but weak or no expression in normal tissues. Alethia’s lead pipeline product in this indication is a mAb against AB-0447, a cell-surface antigen that is expressed in epithelial cancer cells.
