Discovery

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a cancer with high mortality rates. Due to its insidious onset, aggressive invasion and difficulty of early diagnosis, most HCC cases are locally advanced or metastatic at the time of diagnosis. Sorafenib is the preferred first-line therapy for the advanced HCC patients. Many patients do not respond to sorafenib and those who respond later acquire resistance to sorafenib.

Our solution to this high unmet medical need is VAA-1a, an orally available novel multikinase inhibitor that predominantly targets receptor tyrosine kinases TrkA, TrkB, TrkC, VEGFR (1,2 and 3), Mer, Axl and MET. VAA-1a inhibits sorafenib resistant cell lines and prevents metastasis in the in vivo models of sorafenib resistant HCC.

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