Step Pharma

The company's business model revolves around the discovery and clinical development of proprietary small molecule therapeutics. Step Pharma has secured significant funding to advance its research, raising a total of $51.7 million over three rounds, including a $41.6 million Series B round in March 2021 co-led by Hadean Ventures and Sunstone Life Science Ventures. This capital is directed towards progressing its pipeline through the rigorous phases of clinical trials to eventually bring new treatments to market.

Step Pharma's lead product candidate is dencatistat (STP938), a first-in-class, orally administered, selective inhibitor of CTPS1. This drug is designed to block the de novo pyrimidine synthesis pathway, a process that cancer cells are particularly dependent on for DNA synthesis and proliferation, thereby killing cancer cells while sparing healthy ones. Dencatistat entered clinical development in October 2022 with a Phase I/II trial for treating relapsed and refractory T-cell and B-cell lymphomas. More recently, the company has expanded its clinical program to include solid tumors, initiating a Phase I trial for ovarian cancer based on a synthetic lethality approach that targets tumors with a specific biomarker (CTPS2 deletion). This strategy has the potential to be applied in a tumor-agnostic manner to other cancers exhibiting the same biomarker.