Lab mouse
Preclinical results support clinical testing of an experimental agent in acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS), according to researchers.
The agent, ALRN-6924, was shown to combat AML and MDS by restoring activity of the tumor-suppressing protein p53.
ALRN-6924 exhibited antileukemic activity in AML cells and mouse models of the disease, as well as in a patient with MDS and excess leukemic blasts who received the drug on a compassionate-use basis.
These results, published in Science Translational Medicine, have led to a phase 1 trial of ALRN-6924 in patients with AML or MDS.
ALRN-6924 was developed by Aileron Therapeutics Inc., to target p53 by inhibiting 2 naturally occurring proteins, MDMX and MDM2. Overexpression of these proteins inactivates p53, allowing cancer cells to multiply unchecked.
In the current study, researchers set out to confirm ALRN-6924’s mechanism of action and determine the efficacy of the drug in AML/MDS. This work was supported, in part, by grants from Aileron Therapeutics Inc., and the National Institutes of Health.
The researchers did find that ALRN-6924 targets both MDMX and MDM2, blocking their interaction with p53 in AML cells.
The team said ALRN-6924 inhibited proliferation by inducing cell-cycle arrest and apoptosis in AML cell lines and AML patient cells, including leukemic stem cell-enriched populations.
“This is important because AML is driven by stem cells, and, if you don’t target stem cells, the disease will come back very quickly,” said study author Ulrich Steidl, MD, PhD, of Albert Einstein College of Medicine in Bronx, New York.
The researchers also found that ALRN-6924 greatly increased survival in a mouse model of AML. The median survival was 34 days in vehicle-treated control mice, 83 days in mice that received ALRN-6924 at 20 mg/kg twice a week, and 151 days in mice that received ALRN-6924 at 20 mg/kg three times a week.
“This is a very striking response,” Dr Steidl said. “Most experimental drugs for leukemia achieve an increase in survival of only a few days in these preclinical models. Even more importantly, ALRN-6924 effectively cured about 40% of the treated mice, meaning they were disease-free more than 1 year after treatment, essentially a lifetime for a mouse.”
Finally, the researchers assessed the effects of ALRN-6924 in a patient who had high-risk MDS with excess leukemic blasts.
The team found the p53 protein “was rapidly induced” in CD34+ leukemic blasts but not in healthy lymphocytes. And ALRN-6924 reduced the number of malignant cells circulating in the blood.
“This test was not designed to assess the efficacy of the drug in humans,” Dr Steidl noted. “That has to be done in a proper clinical trial. Our goal was to determine whether it can hit the desired target in human cells in a clinical setting, which it did in this individual.”
ALRN-6924 is a stapled alpha-helical peptide, a class of drugs whose helical structure is stabilized using hydrocarbon “staples.” The stapling prevents the peptides from being degraded by enzymes before reaching their intended target. ALRN-6924 is the first stapled peptide therapeutic to be tested in patients.
In the phase 1 trial (NCT02909972), researchers are testing ALRN-6924 in patients with relapsed/refractory AML or advanced MDS.