Into the Clinic. And Right Back Out.

Here’s a good example of why all of us in the industry tiptoe into Phase I trials, the first-in-man studies. A company called SGX, recently acquired by Eli Lilly, has been developing a kinase inhibitor (SGX523) targeting the enzyme cMET. That’s a well-known anticancer drug target, with a lot of activity going on in the space.

SGX’s specialty is fragment-based design, and they’ve spoken several times at meetings about the SGX523 story. The starting point for the drug seems to have come out of X-ray crystallographic screening (the company has significant amounts of X-ray synchrotron beamline time, which you’re going to need if you choose this approach). They refined the lead, in what (if you believe their presentations) was a pretty short amount of time, to the clinical candidate. It seems to have had reasonable potency and pharmacokinetics, very good oral bioavailability, no obvious liabilities with metabolizing enzymes or the dreaded hERG channel. And it was active in the animal models, however much you can trust that in oncology.

So off to the clinic they went. Phase I trials started enrolling patients in January of last year – but by March, the company had to announce that all dosing had been halted. That was fast, but there was a mighty good reason. The higher doses were associated with acute renal failure, something that most certainly hadn’t been noticed in the mouse models, or the rats, or the dogs. It turns out that the compound (or possibly a metabolite, it’s not clear to me) was crystallizing out in the kidneys. Good-looking crystals, too, I have to say. I can’t usually grow anything like that in the lab; maybe I should try crystallizing things out from urine.

Needless to say, obstructive nephropathy is not what you look for in a clinical candidate. There’s no market for instant kidney stones, especially when they appear all over the place at the same time. The patients in the Phase I trial did recover; kidney function was restored after dosing was stopped and the compound had a chance to wash out. But SGX523, which was (other than its unlovely structure) a perfectly reasonable-looking drug candidate, is dead. It didn’t take long.

Read the original article at In the Pipeline – Into the Clinic. And Right Back Out.