KineMed's fibrosis research program featured in Nature Medicine

Jan 24 2011

KineMed Inc.'s (www.kinemed.com) fibrosis research program, which aims to advance the discovery and development of drugs to treat this major disease, is featured in the January edition of Nature Medicine.

“Before you can attempt to modulate fibrosis, you have to be able to measure it. Our approach has already proven useful for a broad range of diseases”

Nature Medicine's feature article, "Scarred by Disease" highlights KineMed's current fibrosis research program to measure collagen synthesis and breakdown, the processes that can cross the line from a necessary component of healing and normal tissue maintenance to the harmful cause of progressive disease.

While collagen is popularly known for its essential role in maintaining tissue strength and healing, including its role in youthful looking skin, the overabundant production of collagen due to injury or disease (termed fibrogenesis) can lead to a deadly disease known as fibrosis. Diseases involving fibrosis cause nearly 45% of all deaths in industrialized nations, according to statistics published in the Journal of Pathology (J. Pathol. 214, 199-210, 2008).

"Fibrosis turns up almost everywhere you look for it; it's a major culprit behind diseases ranging from the scarring in the liver known as cirrhosis, which kills about 30,000 people in the US each year, to cardiovascular conditions such as atherosclerosis and endomyocardial fibrosis," writes Thomas Hayden in Nature Medicine.

No therapeutic is currently approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the treatment of fibrosis. The difficulty of tackling the mechanism of fibrosis-based disease is illustrated by recent trials of drugs to treat Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis (IPF), a common and lethal lung disease, affecting approximately 200,000 Americans. Thus far, trials have failed to yield drugs that improve patient outcome.

KineMed's patented approach to monitoring fibrosis uses proprietary stable isotope labeling techniques combined with ultra-high resolution mass spectrometry to measure the dynamics of collagen in the body. This technology provides unique insights into the causal events underlying fibrotic diseases. This program is currently accelerating the development of therapeutic approaches to fibrosis in collaboration with academic, government and commercial partners. The Small Business Innovation Research Program (SBIR) administered by the National Science Foundation, has awarded KineMed a phase II grant to fund the development of KineMed's lead compound, Noscapine, an inhibitor of fibrogenesis.

"The fundamental challenge of fibrosis is that collagen synthesis is not an aberrant process. It's a normal, essential process to heal and remodel the tissues. You can't just turn off collagen synthesis - that would have huge side effects. So what you need to do is regulate it properly," says Scott Turner, Ph.D., Vice President of Research at KineMed.

"Before you can attempt to modulate fibrosis, you have to be able to measure it. Our approach has already proven useful for a broad range of diseases," says Marc Hellerstein, M.D., Ph.D., Co-Founder and Chief of the Scientific Advisory Board of KineMed, and Professor (DH Calloway Chair) at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, San Francisco. "The ability to translate these techniques from preclinical studies into humans makes this a particularly powerful approach. Any company seeking to develop drugs that reduce abnormal collagen production can benefit from KineMed's expertise and remarkably sensitive analytic tools."

SOURCE KineMed, Inc.