LONDON (Alliance News) - PureTech Health PLC Wednesday said its operating company Karuna Pharmaceuticals has won an award from the Wellcome Trust for up to USD3.8 million, in order to develop KarXT for the treatment of schizophrenia.
PureTech said it is also investing a further USD1.5 million in Karuna for KarXT, and may pay up to an additional USD17.5 million pending the results of the next clinical trial.
KarXT selectively targets the muscarinic system and contains xanomeline, which has demonstrated efficacy in reducing psychosis and improving cognition in schizophrenia, and also contains trospium chloride which could potentially inhibit the negative side effects of xanomeline by improving its safety profile.
Karuna plans to conduct a safety proof of concept study in 2016 to demonstrate that trospium chloride can improve xanomeline’s tolerability profile, followed by a Phase II efficacy study of KarXT.
Karuna was incubated at PureTech Ventures, and its CEO is ex-Pfizer executive Ed Harrigan, a neurologist by training. Harrigan is particularly excited about the Vanderbilt compounds because they appear to address all three classes of symptoms that schizophrenia comprises. “Positive symptoms” are hallucinations and delusions, while “negative symptoms” include the inability to experience pleasure or to carry on normal social interactions. Then there are “cognitive symptoms,” such as memory loss. “Current treatments are relatively good at addressing positive symptoms, but there’s a huge need to control the other symptoms, which can be debilitating,” Harrigan says.
Instead of targeting serotonin and dopamine receptors in the brain, as most schizophrenia drugs do, Vanderbilt’s compounds inhibit a protein called glycine transporter one (GlyT1). When this protein runs amuck in the brains of patients, it pumps glycine away from neurons. Blocking that pumping action may have a wide-ranging effect on schizophrenia, says Jeff Conn, a professor of pharmacology and director of the Center for Neuroscience Drug Discovery at Vanderbilt. “We believe it has the potential to address all three major symptom clusters,” he says. “If that’s the case, it would be a breakthrough.”
it could be a new breakthrough…i wish…
everyone wishes…
at a time no medicine has responded @ negative symptoms of sz…
god bless karuna and all of us…