Empowered Patient Podcast Blocking the Root Cause of Chronic Inflammation with David Bearss Halia Therapeutics
David Bearss the Co-Founder, CEO and President of Halia Therapeutics, points out that despite traditional thinking, chronic inflammation is not just an unresolved acute inflammatory response. It has been discovered that a different pathway leads to the activation of this inflammatory response in diseases with components of chronic inflammation, such as Alzheimer's disease, heart disease, COPD, psoriasis, IBD, and cancer. Their potential drug target is the NLRP3 inflammasome which has been identified as being associated with the activation of inflammation.
David explains, "We've gotten better and better at trying to narrow down on how we can block these inflammatory responses. But there's just been, in the past few years, a real explosion in our knowledge of what the root drivers of chronic inflammation are. At Halia, we're focused on trying to take out the root cause, not some of the downstream effects or the signaling molecules, but take out the responsible thing, the machine inside the cell that's activated, that's propagating these signals. If we can turn that off, we think we can get to the root cause of what's driving these problems and all these different diseases."
"It's just in the past few years that we've discovered that there are these cellular machines that get formed under the right conditions that help propagate or signal this inflammatory response. We call those machines inflammasomes, and there are five that we know of. There are probably a few more that are what we call non-canonical inflammasomes. But the inflammasomes have been a really hot area of research in lots of different diseases to try to understand how these protein complexes get formed inside cells and how they stay stuck on in chronic inflammation."
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