Date: 2015-06-03
Type of information: Development agreement
Compound: CDK7 inhibitors
Company: The Lead Discovery Center (LDC) (Germany) Qurient (South Korea)
Therapeutic area: Cancer - Oncology - Infectious diseases - Inflammatory diseases
Type agreement: collaboration development
Action mechanism: kinase inhibitor/CDK7 inhibitor. Cyclin-dependent kinases (CDKs) play a pivotal role in cell cycle control and transcription regulation and have long been considered attractive therapeutic targets. However, selective inhibitors have been hard to develop because the CDK active sites are highly conserved. Due to their outstanding specificity for CDK7, the LDC’s CDK inhibitors have good prospects for overcoming this hurdle. They have demonstrated excellent potency and selectivity in vitro and in vivo. LDC\'s CDK7 inhibitors are non-covalent picomolar biochemical inhibitors. These features may translate into an attractive therapeutic window and clearly set them apart from a recently published and covalently acting first-generation of CDK7 inhibitors, also described as inhibitors of super-enhancer elements. In two very recent publications, LDC and its collaboration partners described the mechanistic activity of their CDK7 inhibitors as specific transcriptional modulators (Cyclin-dependent kinase 7 controls mRNA synthesis by affecting stability of preinitiation complexes, leading to altered gene expression, cell cycle progression, and survival of tumor cells. Mol Cell Biol. 2014 Oct 1;34(19):3675-88. doi: 10.1128/MCB.00595-14. Epub 2014 Jul 21) and through their transcriptional activity not only as potent anticancer but even as potential safe antiviral agents (Hutterer et al. 2015).
Disease:
Details: * On June 03, 2015, the Lead Discovery Center GmbH (LDC) and Qurient have signed a licence deal providing Qurient with exclusive worldwide rights to a series of highly-selective CDK7 inhibitors discovered at the LDC for the treatment of cancer, inflammation and viral infections. The partners will closely collaborate to advance the approach from the validated lead stage into clinical development. Upon successful proof-of-concept in humans they will jointly identify a suitable partner for follow-on licensing. The agreement on CDK7 is the second licensing deal between LDC, Max Planck Innovation and Qurient and the starting point of a broader alliance between the partners. Expanding on the success of their ongoing collaboration on Axl kinase inhibitors initiated in 2013, both sides have agreed to join forces for the development of selected further projects from the LDC’s portfolio in the fields of oncology and inflammation. The partners will closely work together, from project identification through to clinical proof-of-concept and subsequent sublicensing, with the LDC leading drug discovery and optimization and Qurient guiding preclinical and clinical development, typically until completion of Phase II. LDC’s CDK7 project emerged from a scientific collaboration with research groups from the Westfälische Wilhelms-University of Münster (Prof. Dr Michael Meisterernst) and the Max-Planck-Institute for Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Freiburg (Dr Gerhard Mittler). LDC has received generous support for this program from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) as well as the Max-Planck-Foundation and its benefactor Dr Klaus Neugebauer.
Financial terms: Under the terms of the agreement LDC will receive an upfront payment and milestone payments upon the achievement of specific development events. In addition, Qurient will fund the future development activities of the collaborative program.
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