Rakovina Therapeutics

Prostate Cancer

The American Cancer Society estimates that one out of every nine men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in their lifetime. Nearly 192,000 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer and approximately 33,000 men will die from the disease during 2020. 1

Prostate cancer that is diagnosed at an advanced stage is likely to become resistant to treatment over time in most patients and only 30% of patients with advanced, treatment-resistant metastatic prostate cancer will survive beyond five years.2,3

Up to 1/3 of advanced prostate cancers harbor DDR-mutations, but only a fraction of these are mutations that correlate with response to FDA-approved PARP-inhibitor treatment. 4,5

In 2020, the USFDA approved two PARP inhibitors for the treatment of metastatic, treatment-resistant prostate cancer for patients whose tumors harbor specific DDR-mutations.

Rakovina Therapeutics Approach

We are screening our kt-2000 series PARP inhibitors against treatment-resistant prostate cancer phenotypes to identify unique properties that may allow treatment of tumors that have become resistant to currently available therapies. Our kt-3000 and kt-4000 series drug candidates are being researched to identify precision medicine patient populations whose prostate cancer harbors specific mutations and are unlikely to respond to or become resistant to currently approved PARP inhibitors.

1 American Cancer Society (2020)
2 Semenas, Cur Drug Targets (2012)
3 American Cancer Society (2020)
4 Ratta, Prostate Cancer and Prostatic Disease (2020)
5 Messina, J.Oncol (2020)