Domainex and Imperial College London partner on heart attack treatments
pharmafile | October 20, 2015 | News story | Research and Development | Domainex cardiac arrest
Drug discovery company Domainex and Imperial College London have announced a new partnership aimed at discovering novel therapies to treat heart attacks.
This latest collaboration follows Imperial College’s success in securing £3 million in funding from the Wellcome Trust Seeding Drug Discovery programme to build upon the pioneering research of Professor Michael Schneider, the British Heart Foundation Simon Marks chair in Regenerative Cardiology, whose group in Imperial’s National Heart and Lung Institute worked to identify the enzyme pathways activated by cardiac stress that result in the apoptosis (programmed cell death) of cardiac muscle cells.
The potential for using these findings to prevent cardiac muscle cell death following a heart attack prompted the Wellcome Trust to grant this research award. Domainex has been chosen as Imperial’s strategic drug discovery partner to provide services including biochemical and biophysical assay development, compound screening and medicinal chemistry to advance the project towards pre-clinical development.
Professor Schneider says: “Our target is activated, invariably, in diseased human hearts, and its suppression already protects human heart muscle cells from dying in the laboratory. If we can succeed in taking this forward as a new therapy for myocardial infarction, this would have major benefits for patients, their families, and healthcare providers alike.”
He adds: “Based upon Domainex’s knowledge and approach to drug discovery, we anticipate a fruitful collaboration with them.”
Eddy Littler, chief executive of Domainex, says: “We are very pleased to have been selected by Professor Schneider and his world-renowned team at Imperial College London to work with his team in the pursuit of drug candidates to treat myocardial infarction.
“Domainex has supported a number of academic groups in securing funding from the Wellcome Trust and other funding bodies to help them advance their early stage discoveries towards clinical development.”
The Heart Research Institute reports that there are over 124,000 heart attacks in the UK each year, many of which progress over time to heart failure, which places a significant burden on the National Health Service.
Domainex will undertake integrated lead identification and optimisation studies on the serine/threonine protein kinase enzyme target mitogen-activated protein kinase 4 (MAP4K4). In this collaboration, Domainex will seek to deliver candidate drug molecules meeting a series of defined criteria.
The company, based at the Science Park at Cambridge, UK, is known for having delivered five candidate drugs in five years, and has used its discovery approach to develop its own pipeline of oncology drugs with epigenetic targets, including IKKε/TBK1 kinases inhibitors.
Joel Levy
