Carmot Therapeutics

8 February 2010

Carmot Therapeutics, Inc. and Sunesis Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ: SNSS) today announced that Sunesis has granted Carmot an exclusive license to its proprietary Fragment-Based Lead Discovery (FBLD) technology. Carmot will use the FBLD technology, called “Chemotype Evolution,” for identifying promising drug candidates in a broad range of therapeutic areas, including inflammatory, metabolic, and neurodegenerative diseases.  Sunesis retains full rights to the technology for use in its future internal discovery efforts.  Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

“We believe that Chemotype Evolution has the potential to transform drug discovery and accelerate our efforts to identify novel drug candidates for challenging disease targets,” stated Stig K. Hansen, Ph.D. and Daniel A. Erlanson, Ph.D., co-founders of Carmot. Hansen and Erlanson were inventors of the technology while at Sunesis Pharmaceuticals and founded Carmot in 2008. Carmot has recently received grants from the National Science Foundation and the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research.

For more information about Chemotype Evolution, click here.

Contact information: info@carmot.us

19 January 2010

Carmot has been awarded a grant by The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research to develop neuroprotective drugs to reduce inflammatory damage and alpha-synuclein toxicity in Parkinson’s disease.       

The award will be used to apply Carmot’s proprietary technology to improve the pharmaceutical properties of the drug candidate CT-3. CT-3 is a potent anti-inflammatory agent that reduces oxidative damage, which contributes to neuronal degeneration. Importantly, CT-3 is safe in humans and is effective in experimental models of Parkinson’s disease. Carmot has developed a unique strategy to modify CT-3 to make it a better drug for human use. The best drug candidates will be tested in the alpha-synuclein model, which exhibits many of the hallmarks of human Parkinson’s disease. Positive results will support moving compounds towards human clinical trials.

For more information, email info@carmot.us or visit http://www.michaeljfox.org/research

22 October 2009 (San Francisco)

Carmot announced today that it has been awarded a Phase I Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to use its proprietary technology to discover new anticancer drugs.

The funds will be used to apply Carmot’s Chemotype Evolution toward an important anti-cancer target. Chemotype Evolution is a powerful alternative to traditional lead-finding techniques such as high-throughput screening. Chemotype Evolution utilizes known ligands to rapidly identify new lead-like molecules.

The NSF-funded project targets an established cancer pathway. The protein p53 blocks damaged cells from dividing and is mutated to an inactive form in over half of human cancers. Cancer cells can also circumvent p53 by over-expressing the hdm2 protein. Hdm2 binds to p53, inhibiting its function and targeting it for degradation. Thus, molecules that block the p53-hdm2 interaction have the potential to inhibit tumor growth and may also serve to sensitize cancer cells to chemotherapy.

There has been a tremendous amount of effort in the pharmaceutical industry to identify drugs that block the interaction between p53 and hdm2, but with limited success. Peptide inhibitors of the p53-hdm2 interaction have been reported, but peptides do not make good anti-cancer drugs. The goal of this research is to use Chemotype Evolution to convert these peptides into drug-candidates for treating human cancers.