Robert Schickel, Chief Executive Officer at NUAgo Therapeutics, is developing a cancer therapy using short RNAs to target and disrupt interconnected survival genes in cancer cells. The therapy has been shown to be non-toxic to healthy cells, which have high levels of microRNAs, whereas cancer cells downregulate microRNAs to become metastatic. This is a systems-biology therapeutic approach that targets the entire survival network of a cell, making it independent of specific mutations or pathways and potentially applicable to the vast majority of solid tumors.

Robert explains, "NUAgo is a technology company. We are developing what we define as short RNAs, and these are going to be cancer therapies that really target the survival system of a cancer. This survival system keeps the cancer alive. And instead of going after single components, pathways, or mutations as targeted therapies do, we're using short RNAs to reduce the expression of multiple essential survival genes. And when you get enough of these genes disrupted, the cancer cells can no longer maintain the system that keeps them alive. And at that point, the cell will activate a death response that eliminates the cancer cell by activating several cell death pathways simultaneously. So this is really a unique area in science, and we're developing this. It's a new modality. You see a lot of promise of this in the solid tumor patients."

"The platform that we're building has the potential to go across solid tumor markets. The recent IP that we're filing is for the 11 largest tumor markets from breast and lung, kidney, liver, and all the way down to the smaller, more lethal cancers in pancreas, ovarian, and other small cancers as well. So right now we think we can apply this to about 85% or 90% of the market."

"What we're doing is we take a step back. We're in fundamental biology. So this mechanism really goes back almost a billion years. I mean, fungi have the same mechanism. And so when we go after what are called survival genes, and they are essential for the survival of a cell, they deal with all kinds of cellular functions."

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NUAgotherapeutics.com

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