I-Corps: Photopharmacology

I-Corps：光药理学

• 批准号: 1744405
• 负责人: Jared Toettcher
• 金额: $ 5万
• 依托单位: Princeton University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2017
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2017-06-15 至 2018-11-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1744405&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Corps; Photopharmacology

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.

该I-Corps提案的更广泛影响/商业潜力在于其能够对药物进行新程度的精确控制的潜力，这可以大幅提高许多当前治疗方法的疗效，并重新激活先前由于不利的毒性特征而未能通过临床试验的药物的潜力。通过使临床医生能够定义控制药物在体内的活性时间和位置，该技术有可能提高靶向效应的疗效，同时减轻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种药物的药代动力学，一旦药物进入临床，公司就无法改变最终产品以适应患者的个性化需求。该项目可以简化调整药物药代动力学的昂贵过程，同时还可以提高其对更广泛患者群体的疗效。它结合了分子工程的进步，创造出可以使用不同波长的光控制其活性的分子，并具有识别具有特定治疗特性的光响应分子的过程。在非治疗背景下，已经设计了一套光开关分子作为概念验证，尽管这些技术尚未应用于治疗。目前正在开发一个研究管道，将这项技术应用于医学上重要的分子。