Benzinga | Apr 12, 2021 08:21AM EDT

Schrdinger Reports Preclinical Data On Novel, Selective CDC7 Inhibitors Presented At American Association For Cancer Research Annual Meeting

-- Data highlight continued progress across internal pipeline; Company continues to plan for multiple IND-enabling studies in 2021 and up to three IND applications in 2022 --

-- Schr?dinger to provide an overview of CDC7, MALT1 and Wee1 programs during a webcast today at 10:00 a.m. ET --

Schr?dinger (NASDAQ:SDGR), whose physics-based software platform is transforming the way therapeutics and materials are discovered, presented new preclinical data from its CDC7 inhibitor program in a poster session on April 10, 2021, during the 2021 American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Virtual Meeting. The data showed that Schr?dinger's picomolar CDC7 inhibitors were highly selective and inhibited tumor cell growth alone and in combination with several approved and investigational cancer treatments.

CDC7 is a protein kinase that is required for DNA replication initiation and is involved in DNA replication stress response. CDC7 is thought to be linked to cancer cells' proliferative capacity and ability to bypass normal DNA damage responses. Targeting proteins that play important roles in DNA replication and replication stress is gaining momentum as a new therapeutic approach based on the proliferative capacity of cancer cells to bypass DNA damage responses.

"Based on our preclinical data, we believe we have identified the most potent CDC7 inhibitors reported to date, capable of inhibiting cell growth and causing programmed cell death in both blood and solid tumors, while sparing healthy cells," said Karen Akinsanya, Ph.D, executive vice president, chief biomedical scientist and head of discovery R&D at Schr?dinger. "We're excited by the rapid progress in our internal pipeline. We look forward to selecting development candidates and moving multiple oncology programs into IND-enabling studies this year."