Our Science

Our proprietary pre|CISION^® platform is designed to enable the selective release of a payload directly in the tumor while also severely limiting the normal tissue exposure of the released payload.  Together, these will widen the therapeutic index of a given drug, which has been demonstrated in the clinic with our first payload, doxorubicin.

In addition to the impact on the therapeutic index, with our novel sustained release mechanism developed at Avacta, we have demonstrated that pre|CISION is also capable of delivering optimized kinetics of release to address issues associated with the pharmacokinetics of an agent in the clinic in addition to the impact on the therapeutic index.

With these recent advances in the pipeline, allowing us to pre|CISION-enable so many different therapies, we envision very significant market prospects as some 90% of solid tumors are potentially treatable by our pre|CISION^® platform with many potential indications across all solid tumors.  These advances have led to new and increasingly valuable intellectual property being developed around our foundational pre|CISION technology, including both our sustained release mechanism (AVA6103 pilot program) and our dual payload technology (AVA6207 pilot program).

Precisely targeting potent warheads to the tumor microenvironment

The Avacta pre|CISION^® platform is a proprietary warhead delivery system based on a tumor-specific protease that is designed to concentrate highly potent warheads in the tumor microenvironment while sparing normal tissues.

Fibroblast activation protein-α (FAP) is an extracellular post-proline protease that is upregulated in many solid tumors in a membrane-bound form on cancer associated fibroblasts as well as tumor cells. FAP activity is also observed as a soluble protease to a low degree in plasma.

A pre|CISION^® molecule has three key properties:

1. It prevents the warhead from entering cells
2. It is specifically cleaved by FAP to release active warhead in the tumor
3. The tumor and plasma PK are controlled via selection of capping group and self-immolative linkers (Gen Two and Gen Three molecules)

The peptide moiety linker, pre|CISION^®, prevents cellular entry of the warhead unless it is cleaved by FAP, thus enabling targeted delivery of the warhead to tumors.