Disease Focus
Signet therapeutics is committed to the development and commercialization of new medicines to improve the lives of patients diagnosed with cancer, especially diffuse stomach cancer, lobular breast cancer, ovarian cancer, pancreatic cancer and the metastatic cancers with E-cadherin loss . We are focusing on targeted therapies by discovering newly emerging mechanisms of the disease and exploring novel targets.
Diffuse stomach cancer and lobular breast cancer (featured disease focus)
Stomach cancer is the third-leading cause of cancer morality worldwide (responsible for >780,000 deaths annually), with ~ a third of this being a subtype called diffuse type of stomach cancer (DSC). Breast cancer is the second-leading of cancer incidence worldwide (over 2,000,000 annually) and 15% of them are a form called lobular breast cancer. The most typical genomic feature for these two cancers is the inactivation of a tumor suppressor gene called CDH1. The DSC is insensitive to chemotherapy and radiotherapy and there has been no effectively molecular therapy developed and available for these cancers that is based upon their underlying pathophysiology. FAK is highly activated in DSC by our recent findings (Haisheng Zhang, et al, Cancer Discovery, 2020), indicating FAK is a potent target for this lethal cancer.