for Research through Collaboration, Threshold retains
responsibility to develop TH-302 in this indication.
Over the past 50 years, it has become widely accepted
that solid tumors are often hypoxic or oxygen deprived.
Tumor hypoxia also causes resistance to chemotherapy and
radiotherapy and makes cancers more aggressive and likely
to spread. But progress in developing hypoxia-activated drugs
has, so far, been stymied by a string of high-profile failures.
Of companies developing hypoxia-activated drugs, two have
dropped their candidates, including Paris-based Sanofi, which
abandoned the drug tirapazamine in 2007 due to poor efficacy
in (among others) head and neck cancer, and Novacea, whose
small-molecule prodrug, banoxantrone, foundered in 2008
when the S. San Francisco biotech struggled under the weight
of other clinical failures in glioblastoma multiforme and B-cell
neoplasms.
The concept behind hypoxia-activated prodrugs is that
they undergo uncloaking at low oxygen pressure. Prodrugs
are inactive when administered and metabolized in vivo.
Conversion takes place in two steps. First, a one-electron
reductase enzyme creates an oxygen-sensitive intermediate.
Second, if the intermediate is in a normal tissue, where oxygen
pressure varies between 20 mm Hg and 80 mm Hg, it reoxidizes
to the inert prodrug. In the absence of oxygen, the
intermediate spontaneously converts to the active drug. Within
some tumors, oxygen can plummet to 1 mm Hg or below in
areas where normal blood vessel architecture is disrupted by
the tumor’s growth.
But even normal tissue can be hypoxic under certain
conditions. In the case of Sanofi’s shelved tirapazamine, for
instance, the prodrug was converted to the active form at
oxygen levels only slightly below those found in normal tissue.
This high activation threshold, says ProActa’s Gutheil, may
have prompted tirapazamine to release the active drug in some
normal tissues with low-oxygen regions, giving rise to side
effects.
“Getting that right has been one of the challenges,” says
William Wilson, a professor at the University of Auckland in
New Zealand, who developed ProActa’s lead compound PR-
104, currently in phase 1/2 clinical trials for acute leukemia.
PR-104 and TH-302 have more stringent hypoxia thresholds
in the range of 1–5 mm Hg oxygen, which Gutheil believes will
reduce or eliminate off-target activation. Another advantage
of recently developed prodrugs is a longer half-life. As hypoxia
within tumors fluctuates, discrete regions may become hypoxic
at different times. A short-acting drug might hit one hypoxic
region but miss another that appears hours later.
Hypoxia within tumors could explain the problems that have
plagued angiogenesis inhibitors like Avastin (bevacizumab),
says Charles Hart, Threshold’s vice president of biology. It
has been speculated that hypoxic environments promoted by
angiogenesis inhibitors in turn breed more malignant tumor
phenotypes. “There’s a rational reason why our drug might work
well in combination with anti-angiogenic drugs,” says Hart.
The company is following closely some pilot studies looking at
such combinations.