I-Corps: Photopharmacology

这项I-Corps提案的更广泛的影响/商业潜力在于，它可能使对药物的精确控制达到新的程度，这可能大大提高许多当前疗法的疗效，并重新激活以前因不良毒性特征而未能通过临床试验的药物的潜力。通过实现临床医生定义的对药物在体内何时何地有效的控制，这项技术有可能提高靶向效应的疗效，同时减少降低患者生活质量的毒副作用。制药公司不仅投入大量的时间和金钱来磨练他们推向市场的每一种药物的药代动力学，而且一旦一种药物进入临床，公司就没有办法改变最终产品以适应患者的个性化需求。这个项目可以简化调整药物药代动力学的昂贵过程，同时还可以提高它们对更广泛的患者群体的疗效。这个i-Corps项目是基于两种使能技术的组合。它结合了分子工程的进步，创造了可以使用不同波长的光来控制其活性的分子，以及识别具有感兴趣的特定治疗特性的光响应分子的过程。光可切换分子套件已被设计用于非治疗性环境中作为概念验证，尽管这些技术尚未应用于治疗学。将这项技术应用于医学上重要分子的研究管道正在开发中。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps proposal lies in its potential to enable a new degree of precise control over medicines that could substantially increase the efficacy of many current therapeutics as well as re-invigorate the potential of drugs that previously failed clinical trials owing to unfavorable toxicity profiles. By enabling clinician-defined control over when and where a drug is active in the body, this technology has the potential to improve the efficacy of on-target effects while mitigating toxic side-effects that decrease patients' quality of life. Not only do pharmaceutical companies invest significant time and money honing the pharmacokinetics of each drug they bring to market, once a drug is in the clinic, companies have no means of altering the final product to adapt to the individual needs of patients. This project could streamline the costly process of tuning drugs' pharmacokinetics, while also improving their efficacy for a broader patient population.This I-Corps project is based on the combination of two enabling technologies. It combines advances in molecular engineering to create molecules whose activity can be controlled using different wavelengths of light, with a process for identifying light-responsive molecules that possess specific therapeutic properties of interest. Suites of light-switchable molecules have been designed in non-therapeutic contexts as a proof-of-concept, though these technologies have not yet been applied to therapeutics. A research pipeline for applying this technology to medically important molecules is being developed.