Hepatitis C Programme
Our initial focus is directed towards the antiviral arena where new drugs to augment the current cocktails are still desperately required for combating Hepatitis C virus (‘HCV’).
Current standard treatment for hepatitis C consists of a combination therapy with peginterferon alfa and ribavirin for 24 or 48 weeks, depending on the patient’s HCV genotype. Although widely established, this therapy approach suffers from important drawbacks. Consequently, the key unmet needs in HCV drug development are treatments with a better efficacy in genotype 1 patients and in non-responders to standard therapy. Drugs with an improved tolerability constitute another crucial improvement opportunity.
Summit is using its SeglinTM technology against a set of HCV targets including the NS3 helicase protein, an enzyme that unwinds the double-stranded RNA complex allowing the virus to replicate. HCV helicase is a validated target that has proved intractable for over a decade despite the major efforts made by the pharmaceutical industry. From preliminary studies, Summit has identified a number of hits against this target and this represents a major breakthrough towards finding new drugs against HCV as well as exemplifying the wider potential of Seglins to access intractable targets.
