Kanceras ROR project has been selected for presentation at the ASCO annual meeting in Chicago.

Kancera has previously reported that the company has developed ROR inhibitors that selectively kill leukemic cells from patients and cancer cells from the pancreas. Furthermore, Kancera reported that ROR inhibitors by their selectivity, sparing healthy tissue, have the potential to be more efficient and better tolerated compared to today’s standard treatments for Chronic Lymphatic Leukemia (fludarabine) and pancreatic cancer (gemcitabine) as well as competing therapies under development that are directed against BTK, SYK and PI3Kdelta.

“In the clinical setting, it may be that Kancera’s ROR inhibitors will have an important competitive advantage in that they selectively attack the cancer, which may allow higher doses, resulting in improved cancer-killing effect than would otherwise be possible and also help the patient recover more quickly after treatment,” commented Professor Håkan Mellstedt, co-founder Kancera AB and Professor at the Karolinska Institutet.

About the ROR project

ROR is a family of receptor tyrosine kinase receptors which originally was linked to fetus development. Today it is also known that they play a role in the growth and spread of cancer cells. The ROR family consists of two receptors, ROR-1 and ROR-2. Due to the fact that ROR receptors mainly generate a survival and development signal in tumor cells, and is not present in healthy cells in adults, it is anticipated that a drug that targets ROR will attack the tumor much more forcefully than healthy tissue. Kancera’s co-founder Professor Håkan Mellstedt and other scientists have also reported that upon inhibition of ROR certain cancer cells eliminate themselves through apoptosis. Based on this, there is reason to assume that a ROR-targeted drug is both safer and more effective than the chemotherapy used to treat cancer today.