Avila scientists find new opportunities for covalent drugs

Privately-held US biotech firm Avila Therapeutics announced the publication of a scientific review article in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, titled The Resurgence of Covalent Drugs ( www.nature.com/reviews/drugdisc, Vol 10, April 2011, Singh, J), which discusses the broad opportunities for covalent drugs and how structural bioinformatics coupled with structure-based drug design can enable the design of highly selective covalent drugs with unique therapeutic properties for treating diseases.

Avila recently announced an $800 million deal - $40 million up front - with French drug major Sanofi-Aventis to develop drug candidates for cancer targets using the US firm’s proprietary technology for covalent drugs (The Pharma Letter December 20, 2010).

"Many important and widely-used medicines work through a covalent mechanism of action," commented Juswinder Singh, Avila's chief scientific officer and lead author on the publication. "Until recently, such covalent drugs were discovered by chance. However, today it is possible to design highly-specific covalent drugs by systematically applying rational drug design techniques and leveraging the vastly greater availability of structural information on disease targets. We anticipate the next few years will see an emergence of innovative covalent drugs that can solve problems that have been challenging for traditional medicinal chemistry approaches," he added.