Trethera Awarded $2.7M NIH Grant to Study Lung Cancer Drug Combination

Los Angeles-based clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company Trethera Corp. received a $2.7-million Small Business Innovation Research grant from the National Institutes of Health. The grant will support research on combining its lead drug candidate, TRE-515, with KRAS inhibitor therapies to treat non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).

“Securing this NIH lung cancer grant continues our multiple indication momentum, coming less than six months after receiving FDA Fast Track designation for prostate cancer. Such dual external validations are rare and substantiate the strength of our scientific rationale and clinical observations,” said Dr. Ken Schultz, chairman and chief executive of Trethera, in a statement. “Combining TRE-515 with targeted KRAS therapies is intended to exploit a metabolic vulnerability in NSCLC and address the significant unmet need for the 60% of patients who do not respond to KRASi monotherapy and those who experience relapse.”

TRE-515 reduces the activity of deoxycytidine kinase, the key enzyme for the nucleoside salvage pathway that becomes activated and essential for abnormal cell growth in autoimmune diseases and cancer. When treated with KRAS inhibitors alone, cancer cells can escape destruction by using the salvage pathway to gather additional nucleosides to repair the DNA damage. Combining TRE-515 with KRAS targeting drugs collectively weakens the ability of cancer cells to grow or recover from DNA damage and increases the therapeutic response. The grant will also fund testing TRE-515 with standard-of-care KRAS inhibitors (KRASi) in NSCLC mouse models to inform future clinical trials.

According to the World Health Organization, more than 2.5 million new cases and 1.8 million deaths from lung cancer occurred globally in 2024. While FDA-approved KRAS inhibitors have transformed the NSCLC market, research cited by the company indicates that six of 10 patients experience no clinical benefit from the treatment. Among patients who do respond, the benefit is often temporary, with tumor growth typically resuming within eight to 10 months.

Information for this article was sourced from Trethera Corp.