Derek Lowe: Click Chemotherapy

Derek Lowe shared a great summary of the work leading to our CAPAC platform and a first-in-human clinical trial.

- So here’s an ambitious idea that’s about to get a hearing in human clinical trials. A startup called Shasqi is using click chemistry as a drug delivery method, and they have a new manuscript on the idea here at ChemRxiv.

The idea is this: you produce a modified version of a hyaluronate biopolymer, decorated with aryl-tetrazine functional groups. The tetrazine/cyclooctene reaction has been exploited many times (here’s an example) since the group was introduced by Joseph Fox’s group at Delaware some years ago. Under the banner of click chemistry, as introduced by Barry Sharpless, the idea is that the two components have little or no reactivity except for each other, but will react if they merely come into proximity under the right conditions. -

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