Empowered Patient Podcast Developing Phosphatase Inhibitors to Treat Rare Neurodevelopmental Disorder with Andreas Grill DepYmed
Andreas Grill, President and CEO of DepYmed, discusses protein tyrosine phosphatase-targeted drugs, a new class of drugs. With a focus on the specific enzyme PTP1B, DepYmed discovered orally bioavailable molecules that inhibit PTP1B, targeting the signal transaction pathway. They are initially testing to treat Rett syndrome, a rare disease with no current therapy while exploring the use of PTP1B inhibitors to treat inflammatory diseases, cancer, diabetes, and neurological diseases.
Andreas elaborates, "In DepYmed, we're focused on a specific enzyme. It's PTP1B. It's part of a family of enzymes called protein tyrosine phosphatases, and, in particular, we're looking at PTP1B. It's a metabolic regulatory enzyme that regulates signal transduction between cells and how cells communicate with each other. It's been worked on in the '90s and early 2000s. A couple of companies were working on the target, and they failed in the target, mainly because they couldn't create an orally bioavailable compound that would inhibit the PTP1B enzyme itself."
"So that was one of the holy grails that we were able to find, where we were able to discover molecules that were orally bioavailable and would inhibit PTP1B. It was a game-changer when it came to the therapeutics around the target of PTP1B. Much of this work came out of Dr. Nicholas Tonks' laboratory out of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. We are in close collaboration with Nick and his team at Cold Spring Harbor, developing this new area of PTP1B inhibitors targeting the signal transaction pathway."
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