Kura Oncology, Inc.’s Post

Transcript

After the initial development, obviously there was more resources needed to support crossing so-called the valley of death, which is often used as a term in drug discovery to optimize all sorts of properties and activity of drugs. For that reason, we were supported with the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society Therapy acceleration program, which was a great support like with resources supporting our research laboratories and also. Outsourcing some work to the contract research organizations to further advance our compounds. What we have developed is a road map to go from discovery of the target all the way to the clinic. How did we do this? Well, we funded a lot of academic research to identify the drug target, how it works, develop therapeutics. The TAP program funded both academics and biotechnology companies to enable the development of new therapies and. What they needed was a Big Brother to. To keep them going and to, to believe in them actually and, and, and to care enough about this to get past that, that barrier that had stopped everybody else. And those people were the Leukemia Lymphoma Society, the LS tab, it's typically supporting clinical studies in hematologic patients. So we were kind of unique and really selected for the preclinical support, which was not very typical for the LS tab. But a less recognized the strong potential in this project, we leaned in and we gave additional money through our venture philanthropy program to University of Michigan to to Glenn Beck and share Pecky saying let's make a multiple molecules and start optimizing the molecules. Working with leukemia Lymphoma society was really instrumental for us to start this project. Within that program we were able to demonstrate activity of our compounds in vivo and. Showing the activity in mouse models of leukemia with model translocations. At that stage, we really were thinking to move our translation to the clinic. When we see drugs that look important, like the men in inhibitors as they emerge from academics, we encourage those investigators to hand it off to a biotechnology company. They were getting close to having a molecule that could go into the clinic, but there was still a lot of work to be done and there's a lot of money that's going to be needed to develop those drugs. That's what the expertise of a biotechnology company like Kira could bring to the table. At that time we started looking for the industry partner, which ended U with the partnership with Core Oncology.