Targeting intracelular RANKL in breast cancer

Breast cancer is the most common malignancy among females in the western world, resulting in half a million deaths annually, mainly due to metastatic disease.

Triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) accounts for 1520% of all breast cancers (300.000 women diagnosed worldwide per year).

Despite novel treatments, TNBC remains a clinical challenge due to high rate of relapse, a propensity to form visceral metastasis and its heterogeneity. There is an urgent need to identify novel targeted therapies and associated biomarkers for the treatment of the TNBC.

IntraRANKL is based on the generation of innovative drugs targeting RANKL for the treatment of TNBC, with a different mechanism of action than denosumab, the gold standard treatment against RANKL.Small molecule inhibitors generated in IntraRANKL could plausibly be positioned as a novel targeted therapy for TNBC.

The main benefits of IntraRANKL are based on the unmet need to improve the treatment of TNBC patients, and the economic burden for public health systems generated by standard non-selected and ineffective cancer treatments. Although our drugs are aimed for TNBC, they can benefit other breast cancer subtypes and tumors expressing RANKL.

Moreover, if drugs against RANKL prove to be efficient, they could also clinically benefit patients suffering bone metastasis that are currently treated with denosumab and bisphosphonates.

Analyses of RANKL will allow to stratify patients that might benefit from IntraRANKL inhibitors, improving the existing treatments for skeletal-related events and reducing the main complications associated with lifealtering morbidity affecting several types of prevalent cancers.