Developing Disruptive Therapies
We’re Targeting Neurodegenerative Diseases and other Diseases Caused by Dysfunction in the Abelson Tyrosine Kinases
Inhibikase Therapeutics develops treatments that seek to intervene in neurodegeneration where disease begins.
Our treatments flow from a novel understanding of the etiology—cause or set of causes—of neurodegenerative diseases.
We target a key event, the point at which degeneration is initiated inside the affected neurons, which we believe initiates the disease.
Reversing the Effects of Neurodegenerative Diseases
Our drug development programs focus on halting and reversing the effects of neurodegenerative diseases inside and outside of the brain.
Our pipeline includes multiple products developed from our proprietary RAMP™ drug innovation and prodrug technology engines that address multiple indications.
Abl Kinases and CNS Diseases
The protein kinase family known as the Abelson Tyrosine Kinase, or Abl kinases or c-Abl, has been shown to play a critical role in monitoring insults to brain neurons and regulating biological pathways that are associated with neurodegeneration. In addition, recent research by us and our collaborators has demonstrated that Abl kinases play a central role in Parkinson’s disease initiation and progression.
The breakthrough cancer treatment, imatinib (marketed as Gleevec®), was the first FDA-approved Abl kinase inhibitor. However, imatinib cannot treat in the brain nor inhibit the wildtype enzyme in patients, even though it has a favorable safety and pharmacology profile. Applying our RAMP™ technology to imatinib, Inhibikase generated novel chemical entities that have:
- Up to 25-fold enhanced potency against wildtype c-Abl relative to imatinib
- Cross the blood-brain barrier and treat in the brain
- Nearly identical route of metabolism to imatinib, thereby preserving the relationship between administered dose, drug safety and frequency of adverse events. This provides a level of predictability in a novel drug’s safety profile.
We believe our novel molecules have the potential to be dosed at low levels with an improved safety profile relative to other drugs in this class currently used to treat certain forms of blood and gastrointestinal cancers, resulting in a safer Abl kinase inhibitor that could be chronically and systemically administered for the treatment of our CNS indications.
Abl Kinases and Autonomic Nervous System Diseases
Parkinson’s patients experience a series of disorders that could be the earliest manifestations of the disease. These include difficulty in swallowing (dysphagia) and difficulty in passing solid waste (neurogenic constipation), difficulty in controlling heart rate and blood pressure, along with many other autonomic functions. These arise due to a loss of neural function inside or outside the brain. Our pre-clinical animal model studies suggest that it is possible to halt the progression of neurodegeneration inside and outside of the brain to restore normal autonomic function.
Our Technologies
Our RAMP™ Drug Innovation Engine
Our proprietary Re-engineering Approach with Metabolism Preserved (RAMP™) drug innovation engine enables us to design and develop new chemical entities that draw on clinical experience to preserve the desired properties of a template kinase inhibitor while ameliorating undesired properties, such as toxicity.
Basically, we’re building a better mousetrap.
We select clinically validated kinase inhibitors as templates. From them, we create novel drugs with enhanced penetration into the brain, with potentially higher potency against the target and improved safety to treat neurological and non-neurological diseases in which kinase activation is implicated. They are designed to be administered chronically and systemically.
Explore RAMP™ Drug Innovation EngineOur Prodrug Delivery Technology
Our prodrug technology platform enables potentially greater control over the non-hematological side effects common to kinase inhibitor therapies, such as nausea or diarrhea, and it may improve drug delivery into the target tissue. Using a proprietary set of linkers and attachment points, our oral prodrugs are absorbed intact and then fall apart into the active ingredient and the linker when they enter the blood stream. We believe this approach could lead to kinase inhibitors that are safer and better tolerated, with the potential to treat a variety of indications.
Elucidation of Disease Mechanism
A core activity for Inhibikase is to enter into collaborations to establish fundamental disease mechanisms. We believe it is impossible to properly target neurological diseases without knowledge of the protein factors in a disease pathway and understanding how they fit together to drive disease.