Curis Announces Reports of New Cancers Linked to Abnormal Hedgehog Pathway Signaling
Thursday April 21, 8:30 am ET
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 21, 2005--Curis, Inc. (NASDAQ: CRIS - News), a therapeutic drug development company, today announced that there were a number of new reports presented at the current annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research that corroborate and expand our understanding of the linkage between abnormal Hedgehog pathway signaling and the development of various forms of cancer. Two reports presented at the conference for the first time linked the Hedgehog pathway to certain forms of liver cancer and cervical cancer.
Both reports suggest that inhibition of the Hedgehog pathway may be an attractive therapeutic target for the treatment of these cancers. The first of these reports, entitled "Hedgehog Signaling in Human Hepatocellular Cancer," was presented by researchers from the University of California at San Francisco and the University of Hong Kong. The second report, entitled "Study of Hedgehog Signaling in Cervical Cancer," was authored by scientists from the University of Hong Kong and the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada.
Hepatocellular carcinoma accounts for 80 to 90 percent of all liver cancers. It occurs more often in men than women and mostly in people 50 to 60 years old. The American Cancer Society estimates that there are more than 17,000 new cases of liver cancer and more than 12,000 new cases of cervical cancer each year in the United States.
The conference also included a number of additional reports on abnormal Hedgehog pathway signaling that either corroborated earlier linkages to particular cancers or expanded our understanding of the potential disease mechanisms underlying those associations. These presentations included reports on Hedgehog pathway involvement in pancreatic cancer, breast cancer, esophageal squamous cell carcinoma, medulloblastoma, and basal cell carcinoma.
Daniel Passeri, Curis' President and Chief Executive Officer, said, "The increasing number of new reports linking abnormal Hedgehog pathway signaling to the development of certain cancers provides a solid justification for the significant investment Curis has made in the development of technologies, including small molecule drug candidates, to block or inhibit this important pathway."
About the Hedgehog Signaling Pathway
The Hedgehog signaling pathway is a regulatory mechanism used by the body to control the normal development and growth of stem cells and certain tissues systems. Numerous preclinical studies have linked abnormal expression of Hedgehog pathway signaling to the development of certain forms of cancer, including basal cell carcinoma, small cell lung cancer, medulloblastoma, pancreatic cancer, gastrointestinal cancers, and others cancers |
