Structure-guided design fine-tunes pharmacokinetics, tolerability, and antitumor profile of multispecific frizzled antibodies.

Aberrant activation of Wnt/β-catenin signaling occurs frequently in cancer. However, therapeutic targeting of this pathway is complicated by the role of Wnt in stem cell maintenance and tissue homeostasis. Here, we evaluated antibodies blocking 6 of the 10 human Wnt/Frizzled (FZD) receptors as potential therapeutics.

Therapeutic Effects of FGF23 c-tail Fc in a Murine Preclinical Model of X-Linked Hypophosphatemia Via the Selective Modulation of Phosphate Reabsorption.

Fibroblast growth factor 23 (FGF23) is the causative factor of X-linked hypophosphatemia (XLH), a genetic disorder effecting 1:20,000 that is characterized by excessive phosphate excretion, elevated FGF23 levels and a rickets/osteomalacia phenotype. FGF23 inhibits phosphate reabsorption and suppresses 1α,25-dihydroxyvitamin D (1,25D) biosynthesis, analytes that differentially contribute to bone integrity and deleterious soft-tissue mineralization. As inhibition of ligand broadly modulates downstream targets, balancing efficacy and unwanted toxicity is difficult when targeting the FGF23 pathway.

Fully human antibodies against the Protease-Activated Receptor-2 (PAR-2) with anti-inflammatory activity.

PAR-2 belongs to a family of G-protein coupled Protease-Activated Receptors (PAR) which are activated by specific proteolytic cleavage in the extracellular N-terminal region. PAR-2 is activated by proteases such as trypsin, tryptase, proteinase 3, factor VIIa, factor Xa and is thought to be a mediator of inflammation and tissue injury, where elevated levels of proteases are found. Utilizing the HuCAL GOLD® phage display library we generated fully human antibodies specifically blocking the protease cleavage site in the N-terminal domain.

Overview of approaches to the identification of inhibitors of cytokine action.

Cytokines are key regulatory molecules that serve as critical mediators of cell-to-cell communication. They play a central role in immune function and are important molecular targets for drug discovery because of their dysregulation in immune disease. Initial attempts to develop agents that block the actions of cytokines focused on identifying small-molecule antagonists that would directly compete with these cytokines for their cognate receptors.