The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps proposal lies in its potential to enable a new degree of precise control over medicines that could substantially increase the efficacy of many current therapeutics as well as re-invigorate the potential of drugs that previously failed clinical trials owing to unfavorable toxicity profiles. By enabling clinician-defined control over when and where a drug is active in the body, this technology has the potential to improve the efficacy of on-target effects while mitigating toxic side-effects that decrease patients' quality of life. Not only do pharmaceutical companies invest significant time and money honing the pharmacokinetics of each drug they bring to market, once a drug is in the clinic, companies have no means of altering the final product to adapt to the individual needs of patients. This project could streamline the costly process of tuning drugs' pharmacokinetics, while also improving their efficacy for a broader patient population.
This I-Corps project is based on the combination of two enabling technologies. It combines advances in molecular engineering to create molecules whose activity can be controlled using different wavelengths of light, with a process for identifying light-responsive molecules that possess specific therapeutic properties of interest. Suites of light-switchable molecules have been designed in non-therapeutic contexts as a proof-of-concept, though these technologies have not yet been applied to therapeutics. A research pipeline for applying this technology to medically important molecules is being developed.
