TPP Global Development and Sweden’s Sprint Biosciences inked a collaboration focused on the development of small molecule choline kinase inhibitors for the treatment of cancer. U.K-based TPP is a drug development firm focused on acquiring preclinical drug programs from industry, universities, and research institutes, and continuing development to the point at which the drug candidates can be licensed out to the pharma or bioindustries, or spun out into a newly established development entity.
TPP’s current therapeutic areas include neuroscience, immunology, inflammation, and cancer, and it currently has six drug discovery programs in development.
Drug discovery firm Sprint is exploiting its fragment-based drug discovery platform Gene2Lead™ to identify and take into preclinical development drugs that target cancer metabolism and autophagy. The firm’s choline kinase inhibitor program is built on evidence indicating that increased choline kinase activity is required by cancer cells to generate the cell membrane phospholipid component phosphatidylcholine, and that the enzyme’s activity is involved in cell transformation. Sprint is running a fragment-based drug discovery program to identify small molecules that target choline kinase α.