SciBX: Science-Business eXchange has announced the publication of "Bringing Macrocycles Full Circle," a Roadmap to Innovation in the field of macrocycles and constrained peptides. This is being published in the November 15 edition of SciBX, a joint venture between BioCentury Publications and Nature Publishing Group (NPG) that seeks to identify commercially promising translational science and assesses the next steps required to develop it. BioCentury is a provider of biopharma business intelligence while NPG is a publisher of scientific journals.
The Roadmap identifies four critical areas in the macrocycle space where more research is needed to advance a field that promises to reach therapeutic targets that have been inaccessible to existing small molecule drugs and biologics. More effort in three of these areas -- pharmacokinetics, cell permeability and oral bioavailability -- would create an understanding of the rules that govern the behaviour of macrocycles and thus enable developers to better identify drug-like compounds. The fourth critical area is the issue of how macrocycles engage their targets.
"Bringing Macrocycles Full Circle" is the result of the inaugural SciBX Innovation in Drug Discovery and Development Summit. The summit culminated the work of a "think tank" of key opinion leaders from academia, biotech, pharma and the investment community, organised and moderated by the SciBX editorial team over the summer.
The think tank convened with other key opinion leaders, including CEOs and CSOs of macrocycle companies and top academics in the field, at the recent SciBX Summit in Boston to discuss the challenges and opportunities afforded by the field and how to best direct efforts towards realising its innovation potential.
The Roadmap includes calls by the summit participants for the establishment of precompetitive collaborations to tackle various challenges. These include the systematic study of which macrocycles pass into cells, and the prioritisation by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other funding agencies of initiatives to improve our understanding of key underlying biological mechanisms.
The SciBX editorial team is already preparing for the next SciBX Summit in 2013. The editors are considering new targets, pathways and therapeutic approaches that will become the subject of the next SciBX Roadmap for Innovation.
