Adam Torres and John Yu discuss drug resistance in oncology.
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Show Notes:
How has drug resistance been addressed in the field of oncology? In this episode, Adam Torres and John Yu, CEO & Chairman at Kairos Pharma, Ltd., explore drug resistance and Kairos Pharma, Ltd.
About Kairos Pharma
Kairos Pharma is focused on developing cutting-edge therapeutics for cancer patients that reverse the inhibitory effects of cancer on the immune system. By doing so, Kairos Pharma seek to transform the way cancer is treated by positively impacting patient outcomes while maintaining quality of life.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest of the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right. So today’s guest is John Yu and he’s CEO and chairman over at Kairos Pharma LTD.
John, welcome to the show. It’s a pleasure to be here, Adam. Thank you. Ah, fantastic. Well, great to have you here. And I’d like to start this episode the way that we start them all with what we like to call our Mission Matters Minute. So John, at Mission Matters, our aim and our goal is to amplify stories for entrepreneurs, for executives, for experts, for companies and organizations that we feel need to be heard.
I mean, , that’s our mission. John, what mission matters to you? Our mission is to reverse the drug resistance that develops to cancer drugs in patients who’ve been treated for their cancer. So it turns out that there are a lot of drugs that work very well for cancers, but unfortunately, after about a year or two, these drugs inevitably stop working.
And so our mission is to reverse the drug resistance that develops towards these drugs in patients with cancer. Wonderful. Love bringing mission based individuals on the line to share, you know, why they do what they do, how they’re doing it, and really what we can all learn from that so that we can, all grow together.
So great, Evnean. And I guess just to get us kicked off here, John, maybe tell us a little bit more about how you got on this path to Kairos. Like, where else began with you? Sure. So I’m a neurosurgeon and have practiced for 24 years in Los Angeles at Cedars Sinai Medical Center.
And really, one of the most difficult things that I have to do is tell a patient of their diagnosis. Diagnosis of a brain cancer, but as difficult as that is, it pales in comparison to when their tumor comes back with a vengeance several months later. And I have to tell them that their tumor has come back.
And this is because of a drug resistance that develops to their chemotherapy And what we’ve developed is a drug that targets a central mechanism. Of drug resistance that develops in patients with cancers, which revolves around a molecule called CD 105 and an antibody that we identified targets this, protein and reverses the mechanism.
of drug resistance. And so we, hope that this therapy will impact not only patients with prostate cancer and lung cancer, but essentially all the cancers that we’ve looked at, including breast and colon cancer. And so it’s, it’s our means of, of bringing hope to patients during a moment , when their hope has disappeared.
Yeah, it’s great. John, I’m always curious when an individual like yourself and I’ve had quite a few on and who are super educated, super obviously accomplished in their field. And they, lend their expertise, they lend their, you know, their knowledge and ultimately work with and go down some type of entrepreneurial venture.
So right now, and of course, this is right in line with your day to day work and your field of helping people , and as you mentioned. Wanting to you know, reverse some effects and reverse some of the, outcomes possibly that are happening out there. So my question to you is, you know, what’s that like, you know, going on the entrepreneurial side of the coin, so to speak to as well.
And I asked that question, cause there’s a lot of other like highly educated individuals out there like yourself who maybe have their own causes or things that, you know, they may want to do, but they’re just not quite, you know what I mean? Likely to do. Don’t quite go out there and do it, but you’re out there doing it, you know, and you don’t have to.
Like, what’s that like on the entrepreneurial side of things for you? Yeah, , that’s a very interesting question , and, you know, the entrepreneurial side is really a different aspect of you know, what I do from the scientific aspect as well as the clinical aspect , , and really one has to do, you know, sort of a, a 180 turn.
Yeah, in terms of mindset to do, you know, one aspect of the work versus another, but I do see it as all part of a sort of my life mission with which is to give hope and I see what I do as a hope giver. And so. Whether it be in surgery and reversing the, scourges of a brain cancer or in science and identifying mechanisms and therapeutics that can target it, or, you know, taking those therapies and bringing them across.
This valley of death in terms of funding. Mm-Hmm. so that they can actually make it out to patients. Those are all sort of facets of the same entity. And so the entrepreneurial side, I think, you know, , is kind of in my blood. My, father was always an entrepreneur. You know, did several small businesses and.
Contracting and things like that through his career and so so I feel like I got that in my blood , and you know, and I’ll want to continue that in terms of as part of my life mission. Yeah, that’s great. Thanks for sharing because I hope that inspires some others out there that are, you know, in a similar position to where , they’re, you know, highly educated, great careers and like get out there.
And, you know, if you, if there’s something that obviously matches their mission as well, like get out there and do something. So, I’m in. John, I don’t want to assume here, but I’m just curious. You mentioned Cedars Sinai, the medical center. Does your affiliation with that help your company at all? Like just your, tenure, your affiliation?
Yeah, absolutely. So by being investigators here, all three of our officers our investigators here and that allows us to really do our clinical trials here in a very cost efficient manner. It allows us to take care of the intellectual, take advantage of the intellectual capital here in terms of the excellence of clinical care and clinical trial maintenance.
As well as in the translational research that comes out of the research to develop things like a biomarker, which is a three gene panel that enables us to determine which patients are going to respond to our drug versus not. So all these developments that were part of the clinical trial were developed here and supported by NIH funding and validated by that.
, so there’s many ways in which being part of the number one medical center in California based on the U. S. News and World Report and the number two in the country allows us to really take advantage of the intellectual capital and the great amount of resources and efficiency tracks that enables to enables us to do our trials here.
Efficiently. Now, I don’t know if I don’t like to use this word compete or anything like that, because I don’t think that’s the goal here. But like, when you think about your company, and I think about like a Merck or Pfizer, or, you know, some of these other companies out there, like, where does this fit?
Like, where does this fit in the ecosystem, if you will? Yeah. So, you know, we’re a four person company. Three of them are investigators. Neil Bulmick is our chief scientific officer and identify the mechanism of cancer drug resistance. And develop the therapy and Rob Morales, our VP of research and development is a structural biologist that identifies a pocket in a protein that a small molecule or drug can fit and do its action.
And I’m a translational scientist. I’m an immunologist as well as a neurosurgeon and clinician. And so I help develop these therapies and get them into clinical trials. By virtue of us being three scientists in the company you know, the way , we see ourselves is not as competitors to Merck or Pfizer, but as a group that identified a mechanism and drug that can help all of these pharmaceutical companies make their drugs work for longer and more efficiently and effectively.
And so we’re, not so much competitors as helpers to a very big problem in the pharmaceutical industry, which is resistance to drugs. Yeah, I think it was a great story and it’s why I wanted to bring it to my audience. And I’m curious as to like, so where does this stand right now? Like, talk to me maybe about where Kairos Farm was at in current stage and like, maybe plans for the future.
Yeah, sure. So right now we’re enrolling in a large randomized phase two trial for patients with prostate cancer which are patients that are castrate resistance, meaning that they’re on androgen reversing therapy. And so when patients become resistant to a drug that they’re on we randomize therapy.
them to either receive our drug and a third generation anti angiogen therapy called apalutamide or or apalutamide alone to see whether patients live longer without recurrence with our drug. We are also in a phase one trial in non small cell lung cancer in patients that are being treated with Tegriso and when they become resistant to Tegriso or when they’re being treated with Tegriso.
Incompletely treated by Tigris, so we add EMV 105 to see whether we can reverse this kind of resistance as well. So we’re in the midst of clinical trials in large cancers, but again, we’ve also demonstrated this to be relevant for head and neck cancers, breast cancers, and colon cancers. So we plan to take this to widespread cancers.
And also we have some very novel immunotherapy drugs that we’ve developed that were rapidly bringing to clinical trial. And one I’d like to highlight is KROS 1 0 1 which is a drug that expands t-cell so that they can kill tumor cells more effectively. Because really one of the problems in cancer therapy is the lack of T cells that can fight against cancer cells.
And so. What this does is really dramatically increases the number of T cells that can target the tumor. So these are some of our near term initiatives. We have several drugs that we’d like to bring forward as well as we develop the bandwidth and capital but we have a great pipeline of innovative therapies that we are convinced will make an impact in cancer therapy.
It was wonderful. Well, John, this has been really a pleasure having you on the show today, and I appreciate you taking some time out for us to hear to hear what you’re working on and to get that out to my audience as well. That being said, if somebody’s listening to this and if they want to continue to follow the journey of Kairos Pharma or yourself or any of the those involved, like, how do they do that?
What’s the best way for people to get information? Sure. The best way is to see us online at kairospharma. com. That’s K A I R O S pharma, P H A R M A dot com. And they can see what our pipeline is, where we’ve been, some of our press releases, and stock information. Amazing. And for everybody listening, just so you know, we’ll put those links in the show notes so you can just click on them and head right on over.
And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe or follow button. This is a daily show. Each and every day, we’re bringing you new ideas, new thought leaders, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way in your journey as well.
So again, hit that subscribe or follow button. And John, thanks again so much for coming on the show. Thank you, Adam. It was a real pleasure.