Targeted therapies prevent the growth of cancers by inhibiting specific proteins required for tumour growth, with one major advantage being the reduced side effects versus traditional chemotherapy. Clinical trials of drugs which selectively target genetic drivers of the disease often have the best outcomes. Early in the discovery process, our targeted therapy programmes also involve discovering biomarkers to identify a genetically defined patient population that will benefit most from our drugs. We believe this approach will increase our success in the clinic, reduce overall development costs and help to accelerate the delivery of medicines to patients. Our ambition is to continue to discover and develop proprietary, small molecule drugs for a precision medicine approach to cancer therapy, addressing areas of high unmet medical need.

Recent advances in immuno-oncology have been transformative, producing long-lasting, robust responses in a subset of cancer patients. These advances include the immune checkpoint inhibitor class of therapies, such as anti-PD-1/PD-L1 antibodies. Despite these breakthroughs, there remains a significant proportion of patients who are resistant to such treatments, and therefore fail to benefit from these lifesaving therapies. Our programmes in immuno-oncology aim to provide monotherapy treatment options or combine our compounds with existing immune checkpoint inhibitors to improve response rates in these resistant patient populations.