Heart failure, gout, COVID-19, melanoma
Completed Phase 1 and Phase 1b in patients with heart failure and Phase 2a in patients with acute gout flares. A Phase 2 trial for people with moderate COVID-19 symptoms is ongoing, and the company is planning a Phase 2 trial in late-stage melanoma, along with an approved immunotherapy.
Drugging the inflammasome
For years after the inflammasome’s initial discovery, the search for drugs that target it yielded no promising leads, Cooper says. “Big pharma all went and screened their libraries of drugs and said, can we find an inhibitor? But no one could.”
Several years ago, that began to change. Luke O’Neill, an immunologist at Trinity College Dublin, was one of the people searching for an NLRP3 inhibitor, with colleagues at his company Opsona. He knew that a scientist named Chris Gabel had been working at Pfizer in the late 1990s on a molecule called CRID3, which appeared to block IL-1β production. O’Neill was intrigued and in 2