Visionary Pharmaceuticals Awarded Phase 1 SBIR Grant

Visionary Pharmaceuticals, Inc., has announced that the company has obtained a significant Phase 1 Small Business Innovation Research award “Development of RORγt Immunomodulators Targeting the TH17 Axis in IBD”.

The company is using the proceeds to develop novel small molecule retinoic acid related orphan receptor (ROR) modulators targeting TH17 T- lymphocytes in inflammatory bowel disease.

Visionary Pharmaceuticals has created an innovative drug discovery engine utilizing proprietary structure-based drug design technology to focus on nuclear hormone receptors.

The BindingSIGHTs platform encompasses an advanced suite of structural biology and chemical informatics computational tools.

BindingSIGHTs enables sophisticated in silico screening and structure-based drug design for molecular drug targets. With cell assays and deep expertise in nuclear receptor drug discovery Visionary Pharmaceuticals is currently developing several chemically diverse RORγt inverse agonists.

These compounds are potent, selective and demonstrate functional activity to ablate human TH17 differentiation and IL-17 cytokine secretion ex vivo.

“Nuclear hormone receptor modulators account for nearly 15% of all drugs sold in the US with $27 billion in annual sales. In this highly druggable class of targets RORγt inverse agonists represent a potential new source of blockbuster medications for significant unmet medical needs in autoimmune disease. With this grant we can now enable final optimization of our lead series as we move towards selection of an IND candidate.”, said Gordon Alton, Ph.D., President and CEO of Visionary.

Alton continued, “Obtaining this grant, especially under the current NIH budget pressures, reinforces the deep scientific credibility of our organization and rewards us for creating an innovative approach to treating inflammatory bowel disease.”