Publications by authors named "B Marchand"

Article Synopsis
  • Researchers discovered a strong and selective antagonist for the lysophosphatidic acid receptor 1 (LPAR1), which has antifibrotic properties, initially validated through a specific assay involving MRTF-A.* -
  • Structural modifications improved the compound's stability and pharmacokinetics, leading to a promising candidate for oral dosing that effectively blocked LPA-induced histamine release and showed efficacy against lung fibrosis in preclinical tests.* -
  • Despite its potential, the development of the LPAR1 antagonist was discontinued due to observed CNS toxicity in dog models, raising safety concerns for clinical use in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF).*
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Acute respiratory viral infections, such as pneumovirus and respiratory picornavirus infections, exacerbate disease in COPD and asthma patients. A research program targeting respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) led to the discovery of GS-7682 (), a novel phosphoramidate prodrug of a 4'-CN-4-aza-7,9-dideazaadenosine -nucleoside GS-646089 () with broad antiviral activity against RSV (EC = 3-46 nM), human metapneumovirus (EC = 210 nM), human rhinovirus (EC = 54-61 nM), and enterovirus (EC = 83-90 nM). Prodrug optimization for cellular potency and lung cell metabolism identified 5'-methyl [()-hydroxy(phenoxy)phosphoryl]-l-alaninate in combination with 2',3'-diisobutyrate promoieties as being optimal for high levels of intracellular triphosphate formation and .

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Motivation: Noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs) express their functions by adopting molecular structures. Specifically, RNA secondary structures serve as a relatively stable intermediate step before tertiary structures, offering a reliable signature of molecular function. Consequently, within an RNA functional family, secondary structures are generally more evolutionarily conserved than sequences.

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Motivation: Many bioinformatics problems can be approached as optimization or controlled sampling tasks, and solved exactly and efficiently using Dynamic Programming (DP). However, such exact methods are typically tailored towards specific settings, complex to develop, and hard to implement and adapt to problem variations.

Methods: We introduce the Infrared framework to overcome such hindrances for a large class of problems.

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Protease inhibitors (PIs) remain an important component of antiretroviral therapy for the treatment of HIV-1 infection due to their high genetic barrier to resistance development. Nevertheless, the two most commonly prescribed HIV PIs, atazanavir and darunavir, still require co-administration with a pharmacokinetic boosting agent to maintain sufficient drug plasma levels which can lead to undesirable drug-drug interactions. Herein, we describe GS-9770, a novel investigational non-peptidomimetic HIV PI with unboosted once-daily oral dosing potential due to improvements in its metabolic stability and its pharmacokinetic properties in preclinical animal species.

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