Our Goals

• Discover new, selective well tolerated kinase inhbitors

• Use modern pathophysiological techniques to match them to specific diseases

• Validate and develop the compounds as candidate drugs.
  
  

The consortium has a lead series of kinase inhibitors with unusual anti-inflammatory properties.

The drug leads were originally elaborated as a potential therapy for inflammatory bowel disease, however, the potency of the compounds and their general anti-inflammatory mode of action has raised the possibility of studying their utility in diseases including rheumatoid arthritis, inflamamatory bowel disease and cancer.

A key issue in bringing substances of this class to the clinic is variable patient response to kinase inhibitors in previous trials.

Data to date have indicated that there is a potential groups of responders for whom therapy with this class is highly beneficial. The effect of non-responders has, however, made trial outcomes too variable to warrant further development.

To solve this problem, we intend to further extend proof-of-concept via patient stratification techniques to allow us to select responder populations for eventual clinical trials.

A CT image of an arthritic joint in which bone erosion is taking place