P-217ABCG2 and TOP-1 as predictive biomarkers and targets for therapy in colon cancer

Introduction: There is a need for new and innovative solutions in the medical treatment of colon cancer since many of these patients eventually develop resistance to currently used drugs leading to untreatable cancer disease and death of the patients. We have by using our DEN50-R cell line based screening platform (isogenic pairs of drug sensitive and drug resistant human cancer cell lines), followed by testing in the PETACC-3 prospective randomized clinical study, identified ABCG2 and TOP1 mRNA expression as significant predictive biomarkers for irinotecan (a topoisomerase 1 inhibitor) resistance in the adjuvant treatment of colon cancer. Moreover, we have identified a new drug (SCO-101) that reverses irinotecan resistance in preclinical experiments (the DEN50-R platform). Here we present the clinical data with the biomarkers and data on SCO-101 including the clinical development plans for the drug.