Concept

We value “Balance” – between Theoretics and Phenotype.

Although it sounds fascinating, any business today cannot aim to build a time-machine for a journey through space and time.
(It may become not just a dream in the days of our descendants, though.)
We have to be realistic to set a goal of a business even while setting it as high as possible.

Our challenge was (and is) to find a cure for advanced cancer patients in the circumstances where we all do not know the entire mechanism of cancer biology or even human biology.

In the past, we dug deep into the basic molecular science field where we noted that a majority of cancer cells almost exclusively depend on the cell cycle G2 checkpoint to survive a variety of DNA damaging events, such as body temperature and cytotoxic cancer therapies, while normal cells could survive by using another cell cycle checkpoint, a G1 checkpoint.
We successfully designed a peptide named TAT-S216A, which competitively inhibited CHK1 and CHK2, the key signal molecules to make the cell cycle G2 checkpoint work.

At the same time, we thought that our knowledge at that time (and even today) in the cells were still insufficient, hence we decided to hold further exploration of molecules that would more strongly inhibit these kinases.
Instead, based on the knowledge obtained with TAT-S216A, we established a “cell cycle phenotype” based screening method, which efficiently find molecules that kills cancer cells without affecting normal (including immune) cell growth.
Through this proprietary screening method, we identified two clinical oncology programs, CBP501 and CBS9106 with mutually unique MoAs.

It was a balance between cutting-edge molecular biology and the cell phenotype.