Cancer drug discovery and development firm Sareum Holdings on Thursday elaborated on the expansion of the patient cohort for a Phase 2 cancer drug trail.
The patient cohort expansion targets 80 patients and is for the SRA737-02 phase 1/2 trial which will explore the preliminary efficacy of low dose gemcitabine combination, specifically in patients with tumours that "harbour genomic alterations hypothesised to confer sensitivity to Chk1 inhibition via synthetic lethality".

The targeted patients suffer from one of four cancer indications; urothelial carcinoma, small cell lung cancer (SCLC), soft tissue sarcoma, and cervical/anogenital cancer.

Carrying out the trial is Sierra Oncology, the licence holder for Sareum's intellectual property relating to some inhibitor drug treatments for cancer.

SRA737-02 is an orally available small molecule inhibitor that targets Checkpoint kinase 1 (Chk1), which in turn inhibits the progression of cell replication and division in order for DNA repair processes to be undertaken.

Sareum said that SRA737 "may be synthetically lethal" to cancer cells due to their reliance of Chk1.

Dr Tim Mitchell, chief executive of Sareum, said: "We are very pleased with the progress that Sierra Oncology has made across its clinical trials and future plans with SRA737. Sierra's clinical development strategy to target genetically defined patients is an approach that is gaining increasing confidence throughout the industry as it selects for patients who might best respond to a particular treatment regimen while potentially shortening the overall development time for novel cancer therapies such as SRA737."

Sierra, which is currently engaged in a number of clinical trials involving Sareum properties also said significant progress has been made in the LDG Combo Dose Escalation Phase 1.

Sareum expects to give further updates on the trials in the fourth quarter.

As of 1655 BST, Sareum Holdings' shares were down 3.03% at 0.80p.

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