Biotech Patent News, Vol
15 no 1, January 2001
Patent for drug discovery
targeting kinase gene family
According to this article,
Vertex Pharmaceuticals had been granted a patent for a method of designing
novel chemical inhibitors of protein kinases.
The President of Vertex says that “the invention provides versatile
intellectual property around a family of targets of high interest to Vertex
and also protects, we believe, a unique and advantageous method of drug discovery”. Kinases are enzymes which play a vital part
in transmitting signals between and within cells and drive a wide variety
of important cellular functions and responses; there are more than 500 known
in the kinase protein family. They
are implicated in most major diseases, including cancer, and are widely considered
to be ideal targets for intervention with small molecular drugs. The invention is a pioneering step in “chemogenomics”,
a union of medicinal chemistry and molecular biology or genomics, in which
the aim is to determine the identity and function of all genes in an organism:
the method at the heart of the invention combines the disciplines of cell
biology, structural genomics, computational chemistry and medicinal chemistry,
and is intended to accelerate the design and development of possible new drugs.