Benoit Doré
Director, Transfer and Innovation Partnerships
Directeur, Partenariat Transfert & Innovation
Benoit.dore@axelys.ca
Novel Hematological Applications for Lasmitidan
Credit News-Medical.net
UNMET NEED
Hematopoietic stem cells (HSC) are the mother cells of all blood lineages, including B-cells, T-cells, Natural Killer cells, neutrophiles and megakaryocytes. HSC transplantation (HSCT) is used as a mean to ensure sufficient blood production, such as after myeloblastic treatment (i.e. chemotherapy and radiation therapy) and in conditions of acquired/inherent deficiencies of certain blood cell types.
Althought HSCT is a successful approach, it is riddled with challenges in ensuring enough of, and timely, immune reconstitution of critical blood cell types, to avoid life-threatening complications. Facilitating the engraftment of HSC and/or complete immune cell reconstitution, constitutes and unmet medical need that could revolutionize medicine. Current medications, which are based on supplementation of G-CSF, YPO and EPO are cell-lineage specific, have negligible effects on overall immune reconstitution, and do not improve graft success.
TECHNOLOGY OVERVIEW
Dr. Haddad and his research group have identified HTR1F as a receptor predominantly found on HSC and shown that this receptor could be targeted to modulate the HSC activity. HTR1F is normally activated by a physiological mediator from the nervous system called seretonin, which has pleiotropic effects across the body, through its action on multiple receptors. Dr. Haddad team has observed an important increase in the engraftment and immune reconstitution in immunodeficient mice tranplanted with human HSC in the presence of Lasmiditan, a medication that specifically activates HTR1F receptor.
They have successfully demonstrated that the engraftment and immune reconstitution of HSC could be greatly improved by mimicking the effects of a physiological signal with Lasmiditan. The research group have shown that Lasmiditan, branded as Reyvow and currently approved for migraine treatment, could be repurposed for relevant applications in hematology, such as HSCT, anemias, myelodysplastic syndromes.
Fig.1. Engraftment of human HSCs in humanized NSG mice
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