Charis1000, C1K

C1K : Combination Anticancer Drugs

Cancer refers to an uncontrollable abnormal growth of cells. Treatment of cancer cells becomes more important because they ignore normal regulatory functions and continue to multiply through tissue infiltration and metastasis to destroy normal cells and organs and eventually result in death.

Existing cancer treatments include surgical tumor removal, radiation therapy, chemotherapy, and immunotherapy, and these methods are used alone or in combination. A side effect of chemotherapy to remove cancer cells includes remarkably declined quality of patient’s life and low survival rate. Because the patient dies with the attempt to kill cancer cells and it is virtually impossible to remove all cancer cells by conventional methods, we sought to develop a treatment method that effectively removes cancer cells with fewer side effects.

TGF-β is a pleiotropic cytokine that plays a critical role in embryonic development and tissue homeostasis. In normal tissues, TGF-β acts as a tumor suppressor, but in advanced tumors, it acts as a tumor promoter. In addition, autophagy, one of the drug resistance mechanisms, is induced by the TGF-β signaling pathway, so the TGF-β signaling pathway can be a good target for the development of combination anticancer drugs.

The mechanism of action of C1K is partial regulation of the TGF-β/Smad2 signaling pathway. C1K is an anticancer combination therapy that can overcome resistance to combination anticancer drugs and activate immune cells to increase tumor cell death.

In the clinical 1a trial targeting healthy adult volunteers, the safety and tolerability of C1K were confirmed to be good, and the dose-proportional pharmacodynamic characteristics were confirmed. In the future, if the efficacy of chemotherapy or immunotherapy combination therapy and triple combination therapy for cancer patients is proven, C1K is expected that the survival rate of cancer patients will be increased and the quality of life of patients during the anticancer treatment period will be improved.