BioCentury
ARTICLE | Emerging Company Profile

Negative thinking for brain cancer

Sapience takes aim at ATF5 for gliomas

August 18, 2016 7:00 AM UTC

Sapience Therapeutics Inc. is developing a dominant-negative form of the transcription factor ATF5 to target refractory glioblastoma without touching the surrounding tissue, taking advantage of the fact the brain stops expressing the protein in early childhood.

President and CEO Barry Kappel told BioCentury the role of ATF5 in development is to promote survival of proliferating neural stem cells before they differentiate, and that its aberrant expression in brain tumors fuels cancer growth. While ATF5 sits in a signaling pathway with multiple well-known cancer targets, its restriction to early development gives it unique advantages, he said. ...