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Much biomedical research continues to focus on a small proportion of the human genome that has already been studied intensively. The Illuminating the Druggable Genome programme, initiated as a pilot project by the US National Institutes of Health Common Fund in 2014, is now being implemented to accelerate the investigation of subsets of understudied proteins that have potential therapeutic relevance.
Denali Therapeutics is taking a swing at neuroinflammation with a first-in-man trial of a RIPK1 inhibitor, while the company and others search for ways to target microglial biology more precisely.
In 2014, the Illuminating the Druggable Genome programme was launched to promote the exploration of currently understudied but potentially druggable proteins. This article discusses how the systematic collection and processing of a wide array of biological and chemical data as part of this programme has enabled the development of evidence-based criteria for tracking the target development level of human proteins, which indicates a substantial knowledge deficit for approximately one out of three proteins in the human proteome. It also highlights the nature of the unexplored therapeutic opportunities for major protein families.
Strategies such as diversity-oriented synthesis aim to explore novel areas of chemical space efficiently by populating small-molecule screening libraries with compounds containing structural features that are typically under-represented in commercially available screening collections. This article highlights how the design and synthesis of such libraries have been enabled by modern synthetic chemistry and illustrates the impact of the resultant chemical probes and drug leads in a wide range of diseases.
Existing kinase inhibitor drugs predominantly target receptor tyrosine kinases in cancer. Here, Gray and Ferguson review novel kinase targets in oncology, degenerative diseases, inflammatory disorders and infectious diseases. Advances in medicinal chemistry, selectivity profiling and computer-aided drug design, which are enabling the design of improved kinase inhibitors, are discussed.
