AbbVie and HotSpot Therapeutics, Inc., a biotechnology company pioneering the discovery and development of small molecule allosteric therapies for the treatment of cancer and autoimmune diseases, today announced an exclusive worldwide collaboration and option to license agreement for HotSpot's discovery-stage IRF5 program for the treatment of autoimmune diseases.
"This collaboration with HotSpot has the potential to deliver an entirely new target class of modulators to patients with serious autoimmune diseases, such as systemic lupus erythematosus, and will help to further strengthen our robust immunology pipeline," said Jonathon Sedgwick, Ph.D., vice president and global head of discovery research, AbbVie. "HotSpot's drug discovery platform has been able to identify molecules that bind to IRF5 in a predictable, reproducible manner potentially enabling effective drugging of what has been considered an undruggable target."
IRF5 is a transcription factor that acts as a key regulator of certain types of immune responses, and its dysregulation is strongly implicated in several poorly treated autoimmune disorders. Efforts to modulate IRF5 using conventional small molecule approaches have been unsuccessful because IRF5 lacks a traditional active site. Leveraging its proprietary Smart Allostery
