Accelerating Cancer Innovation

By Murali Ramachandra, PhD

The discovery and development of new cancer treatments have traditionally faced hurdles such as high costs and long gestation timelines. Overcoming these barriers has always been a top priority at Aurigene Oncology, one we have approached with unique strategies. From our inception over 20 years ago, we have accelerated cancer drug innovation by leveraging India’s robust scientific ecosystem and forming beneficial partnerships with industry leaders. These strategic cornerstones have enabled us to build a faster, more cost-effective drug discovery and development model, one that moves us closer to democratizing access to cutting-edge cancer therapeutics for every patient who needs them.

Leveraging India’s unique advantages

Leveraging India’s unique advantages to find innovative cancer therapies was a foundational idea for Aurigene. First, we seized the opportunity to hire from the abundant scientific talent here in India. Our team now includes 450 scientists, about 25% PhDs, all working seamlessly under one roof to speed development. High-level pharma collaborators appreciate that we have a robust team that can complete the discovery process faster by working closely together, rather than coordinating work through shipping channels across multiple sites.

Second—and even more important to accelerating the discovery process—we have leveraged India’s cost advantages and the ability to rapidly meet patient enrollment goals for clinical trials. In the highly competitive field of oncology, it can be extremely difficult to enroll patients in the U.S. and Europe, so by doing clinical trials that are faster, more efficient, and more cost effective in India, we are helping bring new cancer therapies to patients who need them. Like others in the industry, our company is now exploring how artificial intelligence and machine learning could make drug discovery and clinical trials faster, cheaper, and more effective, but we are starting from a position that is already uniquely optimized for time and costs.

Saving time with partnerships

In our early days, we knew we could excel at drug discovery but not the bureaucracy and investment-heavy process of development. We created a plan to leverage all our advantages to discover drugs and then work closely with pharma partners to do the development. These collaborations helped us become quite successful, bringing in industry leaders like Novartis, Sanofi, and Johnson & Johnson that exemplify pharma’s best practices.

Today, when Aurigene has expanded to create our own pipeline, we focus on development programs for niche or select indication molecules with potential monotherapy activity. We continue to partner with pharma to develop potential multiple-indication opportunities, which could be cost-prohibitive for a company like ours. A pharma partner or an established biotech has the necessary funding and deep expertise needed to develop these potential therapies. By combining our speed and innovation with their well-established processes, we are developing potential cancer therapies faster to help the people who need them.

Building our own pipeline

After years of accelerating cancer innovation through our home advantages and pharma partnerships, we saw an opportunity to reach farther and develop unique platforms for truly differentiated or first-in-class programs.

Initially, we focused on small molecules such as kinase and protease inhibitors, but once protein degraders came into the picture, we decided to build a platform for degraders in the small molecule space. Six years later, we received IND approval from the FDA for a SMARCA2 degrader (lung cancer), and we’ve been working in the antibody space on a differentiated approach for antibody degrader conjugates (multiple cancers). We are also doing clinical trials with several first-in-class or best-in-class inhibitors including those targeting CD47, CBP/p300, DHODH and MALT1 inhibitor and CAR-T cell therapy (multiple cancers). In cell and gene therapy, we are working on an off-the-shelf CAR-NK therapy (multiple cancers) that addresses some of the liabilities of leaders in the CAR-NK space.

As we bring compounds into clinical development Phase II, doing early trials in India enables us to de-risk the program. We get to see the early clinical activity and make sure that we have the right PK, safety profile, and early clinical activity. The relative ease of enrolling clinical trials in India allows us to do this with greater speed and lower costs before going to global trials in the U.S. and Europe. We also may seek licensing or co-development partners at this stage to go all the way to commercialization.

Expanding access to cutting-edge therapies

To reach our goal of making cutting-edge therapeutics accessible to cancer patients worldwide, we can’t just focus on faster development. We have to make treatments less expensive and more convenient for patients. For example, in immuno-oncology, we have developed the first small molecule checkpoint blocker for CD47 that could make treatment more convenient for patients, with simple manufacturing and substantially lower-cost goods translating to lower consumer prices.

Small molecules have other practical advantages, such as a shorter half-life that would let patients re-start dosing earlier after symptoms of immune-related toxicity. Because these are oral agents are taken at home, they also lend themselves to combination therapy more conveniently and affordably than IV drugs. If current clinical trials are successful, we think that the advantages of small molecule agents give it the potential to make cancer innovations more readily accessible to patients around the world.

As we continue to build toward our vision to become a global oncology company whose innovative therapeutics address the unmet medical needs of patients worldwide, patients continue to be our focus. Drug discovery and development is still a long and risky process, but we have been accelerating progress in that journey with strategies that can be replicated elsewhere, promising faster access to new cancer therapeutics on a larger scale.

Murali Ramachandra, PhD, is the CEO of Aurigene Oncology, where he has played a pivotal role in discovery and development of 21 drug candidates in various stages of global clinical development. He has co-authored 75 peer-reviewed publications and holds 30 international patents.