Take your PI(3)K
What pharma's PI3K land grab means for cancer, inflammationIntellikine's PI3K platform reaches back to the chemistry lab at UCSF
Questions remain about the optimal selectivity profiles for PI3K inhibitors, but big biopharmas are already making their bets. The shift from interesting science to investable compounds - about two decades in the making - hinged on marrying discoveries in PI3K biology to the ability of medicinal chemists to tweak the relative selectivity compounds for kinase isoforms that are implicated in a host of cancers, inflammatory diseases and respiratory disorders.
Few of the inhibitors of phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K) now in the clinic, whose selectivity profiles have been disclosed, are uniquely selective for the disease-related isoform of interest. Indeed, even next-generation compounds generally show some activity against all isoforms, and in some cases even show equal activity against two or three isoforms...