New consortium debuts to study drug-target kinetics

Bayer AG (Xetra:BAYN) and Leiden University (Leiden, the Netherlands) launched the Kinetics for Drug Discovery (K4DD) consortium to optimize a binding kinetics approach for drug discovery. The five-year consortium will focus on developing assays to evaluate target residence time -- the time a small molecule remains bound to its target -- for all main drug target classes, including protein kinases, proteases and GPCRs. Bayer and the university said the goal of the consortium is for analysis of target residence time to be a routine part of early stage drug discovery.

Bayer and the university said current drug discovery efforts have focused on drug-target binding affinity and selectivity, but that attrition rates for clinical candidates are still "disappointingly high." The consortium will investigate using the target residence time along with affinity and selectivity to predict a candidate's clinical effects. ...