BioCentury
ARTICLE | Product R&D

Ironwood's brainy idea

Ironwood's path to the brain

February 25, 2016 8:00 AM UTC

Ironwood Pharmaceuticals Inc. is pushing the scope of what its soluble guanylate cyclase (sGC) platform can do, with a new preclinical program to make brain-penetrating compounds that could move the company beyond cardiovascular and fibrotic indications and into Alzheimer's disease (AD) and vascular dementia.

Although hypertension and renal fibrosis are rarely associated with AD mechanistically or pharmacologically, the biotech thinks the common denominator is weakened activity in the sGC pathway, which it views as playing overlapping and major roles in all three diseases...