NEWS & USEFUL LINKS

NEWS

July 1st, 2011, Hager Biosciences, LLC receives NIH grant to develop novel therapeutic agents for tobacco dependence. Hager Biosciences has been awarded $299,973 STTR (Small Business Technology Transfer) grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) to develop novel dual-acting GPCR antagonists for nicotine dependence. The project runs in collaboration between Hager Biosciences and UCSF-Gallo research center led by Dr. Bel Mekonnen (PI) and Dr. Selena Bartlett (Co-PI).

BACKGROUND: Tobacco use is now recognized as the single most responsible cause of avoidable death worldwide representing approximately 10% of all deaths globally. Directly or indirectly, long term tobacco use has been implicated in complex major health disorders such as cancer, stroke, cardiovascular diseases, and mental disorders. In the USA alone, 30% of all cancer deaths and 87% of all lung cancer deaths are reported to be tobacco-use related. Besides the toll on human health, the estimated annual economic burden of tobacco use has reached over $193 billion both in lost productivity and associated health care costs in the USA. In spite of the sustained national effort that has been undertaken to educate, encourage and help tobacco users to quit and abstain from smoking, only a small percentage of smokers manage to relinquish permanently without an interventional agent. The majority of current therapies for smoking cessation such as nicotine replacement therapy, bupropion and varenicline target the positive reinforcement or the pleasurable effects of nicotine. In contrast, there is currently no therapeutic available for the treatment of nicotine addiction that targets the brain stress systems or the negatively reinforced properties of nicotine addiction. Therefore, our project goal is to discover and develop a novel therapeutic agent with innovative mechanism of action through modulation of convergent and complementary receptor signaling pathways involved in the reinforcement pathway of nicotine addiction.

Hager Biosciences is a privately-owned biopharmaceutical company established by experienced medicinal chemists to provide pre-clinical therapeutic leads and candidates through operationally agile & effective drug discovery chemistry platforms for the pharmaceutical and biotech industries. For further information, please contact us at info@hagerbio.com.

USEFUL LINKS

American Chemical Society: http://portal.acs.org

European Federation of Medicinal Chemistry: http://www.efmc.info/

Royal Society of Chemistry: http://www.rsc.org/

Virtual Computational Chemistry: http://www.vcclab.org/lab/alogps/

ChemSpider - Properties Prediction: http://www.chemspider.com/Services.aspx

Ben Franklin Technology Partners of NEPA: http://nep.benfranklin.org/about

National Institute of Health: http://nih.gov/

FDA: http://www.fda.gov/

Cerep: http://www.cerep.fr/Cerep/Users/index.asp