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Biotech / Medical : Ligand (LGND) Breakout! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: dwc who wrote (22376)	6/17/1998 1:39:00 PM
From: Henry Niman	Respond to of 32384

dwc, I think that just about any polypeptide hormone would be a target. Most if not all of the interleukins, interferons, and growth factors have a similar signal transduction pathway. The first step involves the hormone binding to the extracellular domain of the receptor. The receptor binds the hormone and the binding on the outside of the cell causes a conformational change in the intracellular domain of the receptor which the activates a tyrosine kinase. LGND scientists have found a small molecule that would generate the above sequence of events for G-CSF. Once the binding (on the outside of the cell) gets transmitted to the inside (the receptor has its tyrosine kinase turned on), the mimic has done its job and everything else proceeds as if the large hormone had initiated the signaling pathway. Most of the products created by biotechs for therapeutic applications fall into these categories. I'm not sure of the molecular structure of all of them, but I'll give a few examples. Insulin is a good example of a growth factor and I know that its receptor has the structure described above. I'm pretty sure that Myotropin is an insulin-like growth factor, so it could also be mimicked. IL-2 (Aldesleukin) is obviously an interleukin, but there are many interleukins being developed. IL-4 is under development for asthma and there are IL-6 and IL-12 projects, but of course there are many interleukins. There are also many interferons under development and betaseron and avakine are already products. Other growth factors would include Leptin as well as other polypeptides that act through STATs. I'm sure that others can add to the list, and a complete list would be extremely impressive and all are fair game for LGND's mimics.